But if you want to outlaw this harmful activity [licensed gambling], you have to find a way to replace 6.4% of Maryland’s budget, which is slightly less than the entire amount the state brings in from corporate taxes.
Do I misunderstand, or is this just actually incredible?
No to both. You probably understand it but it’s not that amazing. States don’t tax corporations much (it’s often fairly easy to move your company to the next state over if taxes are lower) the federal government does. They tax things like sales, homes, gambling and other vices, etc.
Good idea to impose piguouvian taxes, not a good idea to impose sale taxes as that's regressive.
Property tax's a mixed bag since it taxes both land and building when ideally you only want to tax land.
States that impose income taxes are choosing not to imposes taxes elsewhere like land, which is the ideal tax. Income taxes have negative consequences since you're taxing economic activity.
Why shouldn't we tax the buildings? It seems like there's lots of real estate out there with relatively moderate land value but astronomical building value.
You can, but it's a tax on real wealth, which incentivizes a reduction in real wealth. More concretely it incentivizes fewer buildings because people want to pay less tax. If you want fewer buildings then fine.
The amount of land is fixed. Taxation on land does not decrease land, but rather incentivizes efficient land use and decreasing land values (which improves efficiency of land use).
Most of the value of urban land comes from the public infrastructure and economic life around it, not from the promoter's actions which are very common. Besides a tax of land incentivizes usage (so wealth creation), rather than thesaurization.
Really? Where are those properties?
Yes but states provide the roads, EMS, schools, etc the commenter was talking about, not the autocratic regime.. and the corporations benefit from those services way more than gamblers do.
U.S. DOT provides a ton of road funding to the states as well. If memory serves, it’s often over half their budget.
[Edit: fun fact: threatening to withhold this funding is how the U.S. DOT managed to essentially federalize drinking age of 21. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Dole)]
It's very weird to me how some state entities think cannibalism will cure famine.
A state is funding essential public services not through productive economic activity, but by extracting money from people losing bets
Sounds like a win to me, you can leave more for productive activity to grow and attract more, there less incentive for illegal gambling, and no one is forced to do it.
If there’s a massive burden with addicts, you can still impose that the gambling industry pays more to offset.
> no one is forced to do it
This logic always bugs me because no one truly lives in a vacuum. People are flawed and generally need help from a community. A small community can't really fight back a well endowed company like gambling companies. The whole(stated) reason android is losing unsigned side loading is because grandmas in SEA are sideloading gambling apps.
It's obvious to me that gambling is generally a vulnerability in the human psyche. For many, it short circuits something in their brain and forms genuine addiction.
It's actually insane to me to use this vulnerability as a tax base to fund roads and schools, because regardless of the funds, your incentives will still be perverse and those incentives will dictate that more people need to be losing their money to out-of-state firms because a small portion of it might fund roads and schools.
The incentives basically state: "A percentage of our population must become sick and addicted to risk and reward in order for society to function". Is this not basically the concept of Omelas?
I read the Omelas story differently but maybe is the same. It's just a predatory dominance play. Some people get the dopamine hit from dominance, so for them it is a double win- their stuff is funded by others and it is the "weakness" of others (perceived by the dominant) that produces the funding. Having and eating the cake, etc.
> The whole(stated) reason android is losing unsigned side loading is because grandmas in SEA are sideloading gambling apps.
Do you have more details on this? I hadn't heard this angle on the story before.
I'm mildly surprised this is a concern Google has to have.
The goal of the governement is to facilitate conditions where as many people as possible are happy, safe and healthy. The economy of a state is in service of that goal, not the other way around.
> no one is forced to do it
Go tell that to joint bank accounts and family court.
What does this comment mean?
If spouse-a has gambling addiction and spends all of the family money, then spouse-b was effectively forced to gamble.
Taxing productive economic activity is bad
Having a government tax base funded significantly from the exploitation of addictive behavior and siphoning money away from productive consumptive purposes is also bad, but less easy to make a sound bite from.
That's... kinda ridiculous? It sounds like you're just against taxation period. How should a government fund itself?
Zero taxation is just as bad. There's a certain amount of taxation that has to be met, and it's best if it comes from as harmful activity as possible, because whatever gets taxed is discouraged. If there isn't enough harmful activity to meet tax needs, then start taxing normal activity.
I think this is a pretty good approach actually. Give people the freedom to gamble, but discourage it through taxes. It's best to tax things you want to discourage. So it's preferable to tax gambling rather than productive economic activity.
Related concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax
Taxing the dopamine thing does not discourage the doing of the dopamine thing. Just penalizes the addict and worsens their position.
Gambling is an addiction without physical substance, it is not clear if taxes reduce gambling.
Incredibly damning, yes
Damning which way, though? Are gambling taxes too high, or are corporate taxes too low? And since corporate income is surely higher than gambling income, I’m inclined to think that gambling taxes are too high AND corporate taxes are too low, creating this odd fact.
Edit: and I know it sounds weird to say that gambling taxes are too high, when one could argue that high taxes are meant to disincentivize a thing - but if that thing is highly addictive, and if no other state action is taken to disincentivize that thing, then it’s actually a really sticky income source for the government who now doesn’t want to get rid of their cash cow. Tobacco ads are outlawed, which did more than taxing tobacco. Gambling ads are absurdly common.
When you lose (most people, most of the time), you don't have to pay tax on winnings because there aren't any. But gambling itself seems like sort of a regressive tax that preys upon those susceptible to gambling.
Edit: at least with state lotteries the state gets most of the money so it is more like a tax; in the case of corporate sports betting the corporation takes the money and then pays a small corporate tax on it.
There is a theory that talk of "those susceptibile" to gambling is in fact astroturfing by gambling corporations to make it seem like they're only damaging the weak willed.
And you're not weak willed are you? So nothing to worry about. Bad things only happen to bad people.
Federally, That's not even true anymore. In the BBB there was a tax code change that says you can only write off 90% of your losses from sports betting now.
If you win $95 on one bet and lose $100 on another, you owe taxes on $5 of that $95.
That seems wild since exchanging “bet” for “stock trade” results in a very different result…
The difference is there's a clear societal benefit to stock market investment, whereas there's a clear societal detriment to sports gambling as it exists today.
> In the BBB there was a tax code change that says you can only write off 90% of your losses from sports betting now.
If I understand correctly that’s no longer the case as “sports betting” prediction markets are now becoming a financial product.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-07-10/do-...
Regressive taxes can be counterbalanced by redistributive policies. Sales taxes are regressive too for example and bring much much more revenue. The issue is sales taxes disincentivize consumption whereas gambling taxes disinventivize gambling.
Sales taxes are levied on the buyer. Gambling taxes are not levied on the player.
> whereas gambling taxes disinventivize gambling.
Do they, though? The vig is 10%, very transparently shown in the odds, and paid immediately. It proves very little disincentive. The tax is paid annually and only if you win; for most people, it is 0%. Are we really going to argue that the tax is a serious factor in discouraging the behavior?
When you describe a tax that is "paid annually and only if you win", that's plain generic income tax.
That's not the gambling-activity-specific taxes that Stoller's article discusses - typically applied to gambling businesses' revenues, not bet winners specifically.
Taxing something almost always decreases usage. By how much depends on the rate and the elasticity of demand. Gambling demand is probably very inelastic, much like cigarettes and alcohol. (Your argument supports this too) If the rate is low too I can see your point about not having much effect. But it still has an effect. Excessive sin taxes can be the sign of a nanny state, but otherwise I agree with it. All taxes are bad anyways, some are just less worse.
Yes, because if the tax were 100% then people would still bet, they would just move it off platform. Just like every other sin tax in existence.
Every other sin tax is levied on the consumer, unlike gambling taxes.
Huh? Cigarette and alcohol taxes are levied on the vendor in exactly the same way a gambling tax is. Make your own alcohol and drink it yourself, share some with your friends, and you'll never pay an alcohol tax.
> Sales taxes are regressive too for example and bring much much more revenue.
That's because "tax the rich" is actually pretty bad tax policy because the rich really don't make a lot more income than the upper-middle to lower classes.
If you look at countries with robust social safety nets, they don't get there by taxing the rich.
They do on the other hand hold a significant portion of the wealth. Unfortunately wealth tax is complicated, both because actually measuring the wealth for tax purposes can be hard, and the rich can (and will) just move away from any sufficiently effecient tax scheme.
So upper middle class ends up paying the bill.
The really bad part is that the middle/upper-middle class is the real cash cow, the top ~75%. These people are incredibly numerous and have good to incredibly good disposable income.
But since they are such a large cohort, you cannot form a policy around increasing the burden on them. And after all, the tech family pulling $450k/yr are still a "working grunts".
So it's all eye's on the top 1%, but a true wealth gap fix would actually come mostly from harvesting the wealth of the top 20-30%.
> the rich can (and will) just move away from any sufficiently effecient tax scheme
England managed to confiscate the estates of its major lords through the inheritance tax.
The rich can leave, but they can't take their house with them.
It's easy to tax certain assets, such as land. LVT is actually the ideal tax in many ways, since a LVT is undodgable. Actually it doesn't matter whose name is on the title.
Sufficiently high LVT will deter speculation, leading to collapse in land price and encouraging efficient usage of land and drastically affecting our political landscape.
That’s not the only reason. Well to an extent it is, because the rich are much better at optimizing taxes, however you can close the “loopholes” and such, then there are wealth taxes.
The problem is that the rich are ultra mobile, just like their capital, so unless you restrict that they’ll just move somewhere else where taxes are low.
So countries basically end up competing with each other by lowering taxes to attract them while destroying their middle classes..
Same more or less applies to companies
They dont get there by making rich untaxed, uncontrolably powerful and above the law either. Taxing the rich is a necessary component, just like the justice system that applies to rich too.
> When you lose (most people, most of the time)
For modern gambling (not including some prediction market setups) its actually all of the people (still allowed to play), most of the time.
Because if you win regularly they limit or outright ban you from playing. If they keep letting you play they have determined algorithmically that you're statistically a loser over time.
So not only is this easy access to online/app-based gambling financially devastating for those predisposed to become addicted to it, its also effectively legally rigged in that the house has no obligation to take bets from people who are actually good at it, and they have all the data they need to detect that very quickly.
Do you have proof to back up this claim? I know there are professional people and organizations (companies) that are heavy into prediction and sports betting, they are not getting throttled.
This might not be the case for crypto market because crypto, but all the centralized sports betting platform do it.
Otherwise they wouldnt be able to give out "free bets money" for marketing purposes all the time as you could just play opposite bets on multiple platforms.
It's a very common thing, it's called gubbing in the circles I know it from.
There are services called betting exchanges that essentially facilitate peer-to-peer gambling, they make money from commission so they don't care at all about your betting strategy, big players and companies are probably operating on those platforms.
Damning in that pretend I told you my household income was supported by Vinny the bank robber who gives me cash and I launder it for him, and that pays for 6% of my household income. If I told you you can't make bank robbery illegal because I need that money, would you take me seriously at all?
There are a lot more people than corporations.
We should found the government via heroin and christal meth sales.
We should ban heroin and crystal meth so nobody does it anymore.
No that would give the CIA an undue monopoly on it. That just screams anti-trust!
The incredible part is how that's only a tiny fraction of the profits the owners of that gambling operation are extracting from the citizens of maryland. Gambling addiction is a big in the human firmware, and we shouldn't allow private businesses to benefit from it, to the extent stem bwe can reasonably prevent it. Make the state the only source for gambling, make it low-dopamine, and get all the benefit for the state, with a sizable chunk devoted to treating gambling addiction.
This part seems disingenuous. The article is primarily about sports betting, and the author reports that the amount that a much larger category brings in amounts for 6.4% of Maryland’s budget. Without close reading it leaves the reader with the impression that sports betting is responsible for 6.4% of the budget.
I think the author was more trying to say that to ban sports gambling you may need to ban legalized gambling altogether.
Not losing bets, all bets
In one sense, winning bets. If you lose, you lose: your money is gone either way. If you win, the fact that the probabilities sum to about 1.05 means you win less than you would have in a fair game. The state just takes a cut of that extra 0.05.
The probabilities sum to less than 1, not greater than 1, right?
corporate tax makes no sense for states where you can hire a lawyer to change the home of your corp in a day. States impose income taxes which are harder to dodge and do less to disincentivize investment from corporations. What needs to change is federal capital gains tax, thats the main reason business owners pay such low tax percentages.
It feels like banning advertising for gambling would be a sweet spot between harm reduction and maintaining individual liberty.
Sports gambling ads have ruined sports media. State lottery ads are even worse. The government should not spend money to encourage its own citizens to partake in harmful activities.
"Make it legal but very annoying" is an underrated policy option. And banning advertisement is the first resort in this line of regulation.
If there are no ads to tell you, you have to, first, be informed that sports gambling is a thing people do, then decide that it's a thing you want participate in, and then obtain information on how it's done. This adds friction. Friction reduces participation. But if you really want to gamble? You still can.
Agree. Gambling, smoking, drugs, and possibly weed should be legal, but just barely more preferable to obtain legally than illegally.
So this is sort of a gotcha question, but I don't mean it that way.
Is it advertising when the announcer for a game talks about gambling? There's statements that obviously would be advertising, so the interesting thing is where and how to draw the line.
Not that hard at all. Is the message from the announcer paid for directly or is the casino a sponsor? Its an ad.
If an announcer just wants to talk about gambling, fine, I guess, but I really doubt that there are any announcers that would do much of that.
I mean, are they being compensated for saying so? The sports gambling industry did not invent advertising; there are already clear laws that govern this.
Norway does a great job of this with the government-owned alcohol monopoly. The stores are always just a little bit out of the way, with slightly inconvenient hours. You can still get a beer if you want, but it takes a little bit of doing.
Interesting, didn't know they do that. USA (mostly) doesn't do any to of that and alcohol consumption and its related social costs are declining.
USA absolutely does things to reduce alcohol consumption. Most famously our high drinking age, but also high taxes, rules about public consumption, and various local laws.
Most countries will let 18 year olds drink beer in a park.
Until 2004, Massachusetts banned alcohol sales for off-premise consumption on Sundays.
Still in effect is a ban on sales for off-premise consumption after 11:00pm and before 08:00am. Also, the number of stores that can sell alcohol for off-premise consumption is restricted by a quota system.
Your premise, that a premise is a premisis, is incorrect.
"Premisis" is not an English word, as far as I can tell.
I do not catch your meaning.
Experts sometimes spell it "off-premise":
https://www.nabca.org/covid-19-dashboards-premise-retailers has "While there are several different retail channels permitted to sell alcoholic beverages for offsite (off-premise) consumption".
https://www.parkstreet.com/states/california/ has "Retailers [c]an sell product directly to consumers for on or off-premise consumption".
"Off-premises" is also used.
Check on that in a dictionary of repute.
My own folk etymology of this infelicity is that it started with the mispronunciation, which is actually hard to avoid in rapid speech, and bled over to people simply writing the wrong word.
Edit: [in reply to your edit]
It is indeed a rather common malapropism.
The OED says that the "house or building..." use of "premise" actually comes from an earlier legal meaning ("The subject of a conveyance or bequest..."). Even for those who (inaccurately) think etymology determines "correctness", this isn't an incorrect use of the word.
I think I'm going to keep on spelling it the way I did.
It varies heavily by state. In some places you can buy alcohol anywhere anytime it's open. On the other end there are limited stores that can only sell just beer or just liquor, and their hours are short and days limited. Some local areas are still "dry" and have no place to get alcohol.
It can be a real pain to get alcohol without planning in these places.
> You can still get a beer if you want, but it takes a little bit of doing.
It takes a little bit of money but you can get a beer at the supermarket.
Or the bar.
It's like this for liquor (But not beer or wine) in some US states.
Why is that good
Alternatively: ban the instant-gratification bets. No bets on the outcomes of partial games: one pitch, one at-bat, one inning or quarter or half. If you want to get extreme with it, scorelines only (points, moneyline, over/under).
Nah the sweet spot is to make the gambling companies pay for the treatment and recovery of the people addicted to their products, up to whatever amount they gave the gambling company.
Talk through it, how does that play out exactly?
Do they addicts have to self report to get treatment? Do we force them?
Should we also make sugar companies, coca cola/pepsi pay for people that become obese?
I wonder could this be expanded to other areas. Say you run a ski-resort. Any broken bones and other issues are fully on you. To unlimited liability, piercing any corporate setup. Could really work for any sports too.
Food, tobacco, alcohol get more interesting... As there is bit harder time to assign blame of each meal. Maybe in those cases the claimants should be able to fully list everything they have ingested over say past 10 years. So that liability can be fairly and exactly distributed.
Don't be intentionally daft. Skiing and sports aren't notably addictive, and don't notably cause harm in society.
Ski resorts do not try to break legs of skiers on purpose. They already have enough incentives to remove danger.
Betting companies employ all the tricks to make you a gambler. The more you loose, the more they target you. And if the gambler atops playing they literally go put of their way to nake them relapse.
I'm fairly pro-market, but I agree with this. I think people should do what they want if they don't harm themselves or others. Advertising these things are different...
I don't have a problem with people smoking or drinking, but I agree we shouldn't allow advertising. However, they should be able to advertise in adult only outlets.
ex: Does Playboy still have Cigarette and Liqour advertisements?
> I'm fairly pro-market, but I agree with this. I think people should do what they want if they don't harm themselves or others.
Is it pro- or anti-market if you think people should be forced to participate in a market against their will? Attention is a market and there is not always a way to avoid giving your attention to advertising.
I think it’s over simplifying a position to say if it’s “pro market” or “anti market”. I would be in favor of more markets existing if there were strict advertising limitations. Of course not advertising limits the growth of those markets.
In order for people to feel right and feel smart, they need their opponents to have the absolute worst and dumbest takes.
"You're pro-market? Why do you support letting children buy cocaine!?!"
I'd argue sports ruined their own product with ad insertion at every available opportunity (and even creating new opportunities to shove ads at you). If gambling ads were banned, it'd just be something else crammed down our faces.
> I'd argue sports ruined their own product with ad insertion at every available opportunity (and even creating new opportunities to shove ads at you).
Side remark: I love to ridicule that of all things producers of very unhealthy food and beverages (or to put it more directly: producers of foods and drinks that make you fat and thus unathletic) love to sponsor sports events. :-)
Tax advertising for gambling? Require all advertising for gambling to go through a state agency? There is lots a state can do besides banning.
Yeah but banning them is the right thing to do. Why would you have a state agency review gambling ads?
I imagine outright banning would create a fairly large grey market. The objective should be harm reduction, as eradication would be basically impossible.
The discussion is about banning the advertising of gambling, not gambling itself.
There won't be a large grey market for advertisements.
Wanna bet?
Try regulating that on the internet, or walk down a construction sight in Manhattan, there are illegal ads all over.
Easily solved.
If someone shows the regulator an ad for fanduel that shouldn't exist, they pull their permit to operate.
We have already seen that you can ban ads pretty effectively. I can't remember the last time I saw a cigarette ad, hell, where I live you can't even display them openly in stores, I can't even recall the last time I saw a cigarette logo.
I have yet to see any 'grey market' cigarette ads.
I think we just disagree about the definition of "large" in this context.
The market for what you mention is less than 1% the legal market.
There is big difference in signaling of social acceptability with advertising existing e.g. as main sponsor of the superbowl vs. existing as Stake logos on social media videos.
> Tax advertising
That move alone would make a big dent in many of the major problems of modern living.
Banning anything is the opposite of liberty. There is no sweet spot, either banning, or liberty
> The government should not spend money to encourage its own citizens to partake in harmful activities.
That's what goverment ever do.
May I suggest just requiring people to register what how much they want to gamble and then be locked into that. If you want to gamble for 100 usd per month, then you can't bet more than that. You should be able to set your own amount, but any changes should only be active from the next month.
This has minimum impact on personal liberty, and will almost eliminate problem gambling.
Problem gamblers will find ways around this regulation. It’ll reduce by adding friction but problem gambling existed before gambling was legalized.
Banning or heavily restricting gambling ads feels like the bare minimum, honestly
>> It feels like banning advertising for gambling would be a sweet spot between harm reduction and maintaining individual liberty
No.
If you want restrictions on gambling, on advertising it, on participating in it, on making money from it, you want to restrict individual liberty.
I want to restrict individual liberty, I have voted against gambling when it has come up for a vote in my state over and over.
You want to appear to be the type of person who wants to maintain individual liberty, but you in fact are not. You want to restrict individual liberty in the area of gambling.
I would also like to appear to be the type of person who wants to maintain individual liberty, and I will vote against gambling every single time it comes up.
No gambling.
"If you want restrictions on gambling, on advertising it, on participating in it, on making money from it, you want to restrict individual liberty."
I grant that, but I never claimed the contrary. I never suggested that banning advertising reduces ALL harm or preserves ALL individual liberty. I just believe an ad ban is a good compromise position.
I'm a former smoker. I would have been outraged had the government tried to ban cigarettes while I was addicted to nicotine. But there's a difference between allowing people to have their vices and allowing people to spend hundreds of millions in multi-media advertising campaigns convincing others to pick up a new one.
Makes sense. If something is harmful to people, government should
1. Ban advertizing of it. (because it provides no benefit for the nation as a whole)
2. But allow people to do it. (because they will then do it illegally, which is bad for the nation as a whole)
I think it's that simple.
As with many things, the degree matters. It is both an imposition on your liberty to require identification when boarding an airplane and an imposition on your liberty to ban everyone from flying altogether. But one clearly restricts your liberty more than another. I think when choosing between different solutions to a problem, choosing the one that limits your freedom the least is a reasonable rule of thumb.
Gambling vs advertising gambling are two different things.
Equating them as exactly the same doesn't serve your argument justice even if you do have a point with respect to the OP's "have their cake and eat it too" rhetorical flourish.
If you want to restrict advertising on gambling you want to restrict individual liberty.
I want to restrict individual liberty.
Do you want to restrict advertising on gambling?
Advertising isn’t “individual liberty” — it’s paid psychological manipulation.
Banning gambling ads isn’t banning gambling. It’s just stopping corporations from pushing addictive behavior on people who didn’t consent to see it.
We banned cigarette ads for the same reason — harm and addiction.
Limiting corporate ad power protects individual liberty. I can choose to gamble if I want, but I shouldn’t have to fight off brainwashing every time I watch a game.
To ban gambling would be to limit individual liberty (see also: smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol, self-harm, suicide).
To ban advertising of gambling is to limit a liberty too, but the kind that substantially affects others. See also: dumping a bucketful of water on a passer-by, smoking in a crowded subway car, blaring super loud music outside at night time.
That second kind of liberty is and will always be limited in a society, voluntarily most of the time, because people want to be good neighbors, not harm each other.
Another problem here is the addiction. Advertising applesauce is one thing, advertising cocaine is another. For some people, gambling is more like cocaine, hampering their reason and forcing their hand in making choices. The freedom to advertise cocaine (and tobacco, alcohol, etc) inevitably gets limited in a society; if it does not, the society likely unravels.
Serious question, is everything black/white to you?
Extreme example: I don't have individual liberty to murder or take things that aren't mine. So I'm ok with giving up at least 1 or 2 individual liberties. How many is enough, and who decides?
Or do we all just decide and that is the point of voting, not sure what you're trying to say.
> If you want restrictions on gambling, on advertising it, on participating in it, on making money from it, you want to restrict individual liberty.
No.
An organization's liberty to advertise is not individual liberty.
Let individuals gamble. Do not let organizations advertise gambling services. Organizational liberty is not individual liberty.
Devils advocate:
You're restricting my liberty to consume those advertisements. I want to see them and you are restricting them.
People are also leaving out stuff like Pokemon, Yu Gi Oh, and Magic The Gathering.
All of them also introduce rarities (arbitrary exclusiveness), hidden cards in a pack, and extreme gambling gamification.
The only non-gambling MtG packs are the preconstructed commander decks. All 100 cards are published. But the packs and boxes? Pure gambling, especially for the chase rare cards.
And before anyone asks, yes, my username is based after this $2 card. https://edhrec.com/commanders/nekusar-the-mindrazer
I feel like it only became rampant in recent years. As a 90s kid no one cared about the card packs. We all assumed they'd be junk cards and a waste of $7 or whatever. No, the move for card people back then was to wait for the card show and just buy the cards you actually want from a card dealer.
The thing is now people are marketing the pack opening. You have social media accounts of them pulling cards from packs and getting all hyped up about it. Again no one thought that was fun in the 90s, everyone hated that aspect of cards in the 90s but thats because the unboxing as an experience wasn't marketed by anyone at all. People just wanted cards they thought were personally cool in some way.
And likewise expansion of markets in the internet era means people start to have shared values of what is a valuable card based on market price vs just being interested in some certain cards out of your own interest.
Consider who your peers were then. Were they likely to get addicted? I know my circle was elite--doing the probability calculations, circulating card lists on Usenet, and joking that gambling was taxes on stupid people.
Now as an adult, I see tweens with addictions to multiple things. Watch them beg to buy a Pokemon pack, open it, and lose interest. It's completely the dopamine expectation. And it takes years in recovery. But I think I was ignorant and unaware in the 90s of what other people were addicted to.
Even if you aren't prone to gambling there are other factors that can apply. I never was into gambling, but I grew up in the Dutch countryside in the 90s, so trading with local players was my only option. I spent a ton of money on boosters as a teen without realizing it's all manufactured scarcity.
I don't know, in the 90s a bunch of friends and I were into MtG and everyone bought packs. The idea of buying from a card dealer instead wasn't even on our radar. We weren't the most hardcore players but I think we were pretty typical; we went to Comic Con a few times in that era.
I distinctly remember the first time I was able to afford to buy a box from a new magic set release. Had a lot of fun opening new packs. It’s too bad I wasn’t aware of the draft format at the time or it would have been even more rewarding!
In the early to mid 2000s we used to do MTG booster drafts at the local game shop. Maybe the experience was different for different people.
I knew a guy back then who would blow hundreds every couple of weeks on booster packs. It was surreal to watch. MTG was everything to him. This was around 2002—2004.
A couple hundred every couple weeks doesn’t seem that bad for a hobby you enjoy
> Again no one thought that was fun in the 90s, everyone hated that aspect of cards in the 90s
How old was everyone in the 1990s? Kids loved this kind of thing in the 2000s.
I can't imagine kids even liked it then. Again most of those packs were junk cards. Like total crap cards. Oh gee a rattata and some energy cards. All you wanted was Ash's squad from the shows.
The kids I knew who played these kinds of card games all loved buying booster packs, but they weren’t paying for these packs themselves and most grew out of playing by the time they reached high school. I can see it not being as fun for adult players who understand the probability metagame being played, but I think one of the reasons these games had so much financial success in the first place was that they identified a behavioral loop that they could exploit, exactly like contemporary developers did with loot boxes.
I loved buying booster packs and trying to make decks from the janky cards in them, until people taking it all Very Seriously came along.
The same age as kids in the 2000's?
I was asking if the “everyone” he was referring to was comprised of children or adults, as it didn’t map to my experience with children who played these games in the 2000s.
>> the move for card people back then was to wait for the card show and just buy the cards you actually want from a card dealer
That's still the move. Unless you want to gamble.
As a Magic player, yeah some people definitely have a compulsive addictive gambling relationship with the product. And Wizards has been leaning into that recently with more rare versions of mechanically identical cards.
However, you can buy sealed product to both build your collection and get cards to trade. And the main reason for sealed to exist, ostensibly, is limited.
And a lot of people don't interact with the "gambling" aspect at all. I'm very deep into magic after 10 years, and I almost exclusively buy singles and do prereleases. I might buy like 10 random packs total in an entire year.
The Pokémon card mania in particular is deeply weird to me. I play Magic at a local card shop a few times a month and it’s always full of people playing Magic, D&D, or various board games. I don’t think I’ve seen a single person playing the Pokémon card game. So who’s buying the valuable singles? What’s keeping the market afloat? It’s bizarre.
It's a collector's market, the value is in the demand and scarcity. Same as with all other collectibles like baseball cards and such. Or even wines, there are some that are so old they become undrinkable but cost like a car. In collectors market the price is detached from any kind of purpose of the item.
Also consider that most Magic cards are also valuable only because of their collector status. The valuable ones are mint first editions and nobody is buying them to play them.
So who fuels this collectors market? Nostalgic 30-something that have now disposable income and want to buy things they wanted as children. Same as with videogames collectors and such. You don't need an original copy of Supermario to play it, but people still spend thousands to buy it.
Pokémon TCG seems to have turned into a contest among opportunistic resellers to see who can buy up all of the cards and sell them to ... collectors? Other resellers? Who knows?
Which is a shame, since the game itself is actually fun. Or it would be if you could buy the cards easily and cheaply.
a recent few shorts / scroll to see them: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1RY5RYlgymrW3mZVmJOVUOnF...
tldr: fights, and watch someone buy the entire shelf at walmart in one transaction.
People in their 30s and 40s. It is the same thing with boomers and comic books. What was once in mass circulation in your childhood is now out of print and commanding real value among your nostalgic peers.
Sure, that explains vintage cards. I’m more confused about the demand for new ones.
My guess is literally just the people who trade them - and maybe like, 10 13 year olds.
Sports, too. Recent post from the President of Upper Deck talking about it: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jmash_everything-speculative-...
The randomness is marketed as part of the fun, but for a lot of players (especially younger ones), it taps into the same reward-loop psychology as slot machines
I used to really enjoy magic. Then at some point I couldn’t keep up with the constructed meta. So I switched to drafting. But now it seems like everything is so gamified that playing the game isn’t enough anymore. Now you need to play all the time both in the shop and on mtg arena and it’s like designed to keep you hooked. I hate it. I really just can’t be bothered to play anymore. It’s no longer fun it’s just a grind.
> It’s no longer fun it’s just a grind.
Like most new games these days. I play only old games or few special ones like Baldur’s Gate anymore.
Yes I’ve been playing a lot of civ4 and sim city 2000. It’s so much more enjoyable because it’s simply about playing a game where complex simulations put together interesting problems to solve. As opposed to figuring out how to unlock the next whatever skin, weapon, armor, card set, fake money gems, other fake money coins, etc.
Edit: btw if anyone is looking for a civ4 game hit me up
Why does drafting feel like that?
I'm not that poster, but 4 times as many unique cards are released a year as 20 years ago (2X vs 10 years ago). The pace has greatly increased the commitment to keep abreast of the game.
Yes and it’s obvious the only reason is because making more money is better than only making enough money. This is probably why gameplay has changed so much to where every deck is some combo blah blah. Like most of the older deck formats are gone. Like look at the decks when they published the 1999 Grand Prix winning decks and compare them to today. Like it had mono green stompy next to these fiddly urza combo decks. I dunno I’m just sad the game sucks now. I had a lot of fun playing with friends when I was younger.
Why not mention blind boxes and Labubu
I never understand why people "collect" these things
Labubus are much less about collectior value. They are more like a wearable luxury item that's sold via a gambling mechanic.
Their value is much less speculative and much more closely based on (blindbox price * distribution percentage of the rare variants) than most of the other items being dicussed here.
I think there's a massive difference between card packs - which have been as you describe for decades - and the recent boom in sports betting. Most people don't even know what MTG is, or that there's even a market for those cards. Everyone now knows that you can bet on any sport you want - and if some reports are to be believed, a large percentage of people are participating.
Anyway, this is why I play MTG online - same with 40k, although there's no gambling there. Just too expensive to play either IRL even if I wanted to.
> Anyway, this is why I play MTG online
I think this depends on how you interact with your chosen game. To me, I play Yugioh as a hobby. If I'm "only" into the digital versions of the game, then it's no different to playing just about any other video game.
And even then, these live service TCGs (outside of unofficial simulators) can often have the same lootbox/pack gambling aspects as the real thing.
Personally that's not what I want. A good chunk of why I play paper is because of the physical community, in a space outside my home.
> I think there's a massive difference between card packs - which have been as you describe for decades - and the recent boom in sports betting.
There is, until there isn't. MTG has been leaning drastically into tiered and ultra-premium products. Increasingly, it feels like Magic design and product is focused on extracting money from the whales at the price of hollowing out their playerbase.
It's difficult to draw a hard line between wholesome collecting and lootbox gambling, but it's hard not to notice that even the bastions of the collectible industry have been aggressively moving in the direction of the latter.
I have never been sure if collecting is wholesome. I think Pohl did show it as one example of rampant consumerist addiction in one of the books(can't remember which of the ones with marketing guys).
I would guess that collecting goes beyond wholesome once finding the products comes really hard and there is very high prices and extremely low rates involved.
And Robinhood etc.?
I'll make a bet here:
By the 2040 US presidential election, anti-gambling legislation will be a bigger party platform issue than abortion is for one of the two major US political parties.
We are ruining a generation of men with this, just as we did with alcohol in the era before prohibition. A wiser and more sensible approach is desperately needed today, but will not come for another 15 years until the damage is inescapable to see.
There’s something entertaining about an article on addiction-driven gambling and then a comment that uses a provocative, attention grabbing hook, on a website that has trained its audience to respond like Pavlovian dogs to bait.
A generation of men?
I mean, in my little part of the world if you go up to any sub 24 year old male and say: " What's the line?" you'll get the betting numbers for the 'largest' local team playing that day.
It's a bit different today in particular though as we're in equinox season (when many major sports leagues play on the same day). So your local college football team is playing today, the world series game 7 is today, and there are NBA and NHL on today, and NFL is tomorrow.
I don’t know this is new. May as well say sports have ruined a generation of men, for at least three generations. But my comment was admittedly more so addressed at the gender issue.
Ah, got yah
The ads and apps are very much targetted at men. I have seen "some and few" gambling apps targetted at women. Traditionally too, gambling was more of a "male" issue.
Also, the people loosing money on crypto, MtG and games with gambling mechanics tend to be more of men. It is kind of a gendered issue.
I'll take the other side of that bet given Western countries with legal gambling do not have this issue. Some have it legalized forever.
Related:
Coffeezilla: Exposing the Gambling Epidemic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45773049 - October 2025
Great video. The convergence between traditional stock market finance and casino gambling is going to seriously scar a generation.
Who do you think was buying options 30 years ago? Institutional demand, particularly for non-OTC options, was zero. Countries which have legalized gambling tend not to have large options markets.
There is no convergence. They have always been the same thing. The difference is that you can provide a venue where harm is reduced or one where harm is maximised.
Wasn't around to personally witness it, but I do not believe the first part is true:
https://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1990/9015/901507.PDF, specifically page 94.
Also, IMO there is a big difference between an open market that allows for price discovery and free trading versus placing bets against the same casino at predetermined prices.
100% agree, ban it all and it goes underground or shifts somewhere else.
See prostitution.
Options markets help farmers and miners decide how much to invest in future production. Ditto the consumer of a commodity faced with an investment decision where the success of the investment depends on continued access to the commodity.
Are you thinking of the futures market? That's different than options
Options can be thought of as a form of insurance, so they have a useful purpose.
In the simplest case you might hold a stock and a put to limit your downside for a set period of time.
The opposite is also true - you can use options to increase risk. I don't think insurance is a particularly good analogy in general.
I mean generally speaking derivatives can be used as insurance or for speculation, and a wide gradient of gray in between.
By contrast, sports gambling is well, gambling. And importantly as we've seen in a lot of reports - the big online sports books essentially freeze out anyone who is good so that they are collecting revenue primarily from the.. innumerate.
Of course you also have some markets like India without legal gambling and oversized derivatives markets that are unfortunately serving as a replacement.
I'd also point out that you don't see the sort of degenerate nonstop advertising for options punting that you see for sports gambling. "Thanks for tuning into the ESPN FanDuel pregame show at the Caesars Superdome / and don't forget to stop by the DraftKings Sportsbook lounge." Followed by a barrage of other gambling ads in between plays.
Yes. My bad.
They are roughly the same thing packaged differently. Both can be used to lock-in the price at a certain premium.
They are both derivatives but using a farmer as an example is 100% futures.
For commodities, the Futures demand delivery of the underlying. Options are settles in cash.
I still can't take him seriously, he's a long time crypto grifter exposing grifting, why should we enable him? I don't follow him very closely but he always positioned himself as a pick me saavy crypto investor not like the others (who were into shitcoins).
Any example video?
There has recently been many looks at the epidemic in gambling. Wonder how all of the focus seem to happen at the same time
Off the top of my head:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-31/great-bri...
https://kyla.substack.com/p/gamblemerica-how-sports-betting-...
https://www.ft.com/content/e80df917-2af7-4a37-b9af-55d23f941...
https://www.dopaminemarkets.com/p/the-lottery-fication-of-ev...
https://www.investors.com/news/investing-gambling-robinhood-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-premier-league-footb...
https://www.ft.com/content/a39d0a2e-950c-4a54-b339-4784f7892...
> Wonder how all of the focus seem to happen at the same time
Because this practice was made legal very recently in most places in the US and a concomitant advertising boom has saturated the media. Before the last few years, your average American couldn't bet on sports without visiting a casino sports book in person, or having a bookie (i.e., entering into a risky relationship with organized crime). TV sports coverage now openly refers to how you can use their analysis to make bets.
Also because the NBA is going through a gambling scandal with players being involved with the mafia.
This is the first time I heard of this, I decided to look up some of the news stories behind it. Maybe I'm nieve, but I thought the Sicilian Mafia died out decades a
They never said it was Sicilian Mafia.
Multiple articles and interviews have said it was the Sicilian Mafia / La Cosa Nostra.
"The Five Families - the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese - have ruled the city's Italian American mafia since 1931."
"The Five Families are part of the larger American-Sicilian mafia operation known as La Cosa Nostra"
I find it odd that almost nobody ever refers stock trading as gambling. While for most persons it is nothing else.
Hmm perhaps you haven't been reading money stuff? He has pretty consistently noted that Robinhood is specifically a gambling app
What it comes down to I think is that historically, on average, stock traders come out ahead while "gamblers" do not. (Of course you can still go all-in on one company, or buy insane options, or use leverage, etc., and thereby gamble on stocks.)
Investors come out ahead, not traders. The more "trading" it is (meaning more short term), the more like gambling it is. There's even a point where you go from positive to negative sum.
Because most people cannot define the difference between investing and gambling.
Also the stock market is NOT 0-sum. A buyer and seller can both "win".
Stock trades with sufficiently gambling-like payout structures do on occasion get regulated as gambling, see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_option
Because stock trading isn't zero sum.
Yes, it is negative sum after transaction costs and taxes.
No, it's not. Person A buys stock 1, stock one goes from $10 to $15. Person A makes $5. Person B buys it at $15 and then it pays a $1 dividend, person B makes $1. It's not zero sum, everyone can win.
That only applies for industries that are growing. And most of the “gambling” happens in options markets which are perfectly zero sum before fees.
You changed the goal posts, the thread started with stock. Derivatives are completely different.
Shrinking industries can still generate profit, and can still give out dividends.
Know your customer laws are gambling regulation in disguise.
Because at the end of the day you are buying an asset. Whether that asset stays valuable or not will change.
Gambling is the chance to have nothing at the end.
With stocks there is real chance to have nothing at all at end too. Lot of companies have failed. And stock holders are last on the list to get returns in bankruptcy.
You are changing the definition, everything has a chance of losing value. There are some things that will never have value, or close to 0.
This line from the ads always strikes me as darkly ironic:
> if you need help making responsible choices, call…
Like, the only “responsible” choice is not to gamble online. What do they even think we’re supposed to take away from that line of the commercial?
> the only “responsible” choice is not to gamble online
I don't gamble at all in any form, but I still firmly disagree. Some people enjoy gambling in a way that never hurts them-- I've known countless friends and coworkers who talk about doing a bit of it in Vegas or what have you. You're saying every last one is a degenerate gambler somehow concealing it totally from me? They know they're not going net positive on the experience, usually lose some money, and get some entertainment.
There's a saying about this: abusers give vice a bad name. People should be free to gamble if they want to, and certain checks should be put in place for people who choose to gamble so much it is ruinous to themselves.
These services make a relatively smaller piece of their profit from "responsible" people with a lot of self-control. In many cases, the business is probably not viable without problem gamblers. Problem gamblers account for anywhere from 51% of revenue for sports betting apps, to 90% in the case of casinos [1,2] and the numbers seem to be getting worse.
[1] https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/DMHAS/Publications/2023-CT-FIN... [2] https://www.umass.edu/seigma/media/583/download
I can readily believe that to be true, but my point still stands, the person I'm replying to made a really sweeping and incorrect statement.
You don’t think it’s ethically and morally questionable to frequent a business that knowingly harms the majority of its customers?
I agree there’s a some sort of gray area here, but it feels awfully narrow… especially with the recent sports betting companies.
I feel like the goalposts have been shifted massively in this conversation. The original sentiment was "there's no way to responsibly gamble online", and that's all I was ever responding to.
I strongly doubt that the person you were responding to was asserting that "no person, at any time, in any circumstance, can ever gamble online without it being an irresponsible act".
But chances are that the original commenter was really using language in a more colloquial way, the way someone might say "the only responsible choice is not to use drugs". Someone saying that isn't making a statement that "no person ever, under any circumstance, can ever benefit from consuming any drug".
It's not an absolutist statement, but you are choosing to interpret it that way so that you can construct a response based on semantic pedantry.
Goalposts built around strawmen are almost designed to be shifted.
I don’t want to derail the conversation, but I do want to make an analogy. I’m vegan, and I mostly go to non-vegan restaurants. I’m giving my money to businesses that mostly do something I don’t support.
The way I resolve this is “What if everyone did what I did?”. The restaurants would obviously have to change. I figure the type of demand I create is more powerful than how they might use the profit.
I think the same thing applies here. If everyone only gambled responsibly, these companies would all be in the responsible gambling business.
At the same time, I think sports gambling has completely gotten out of control and needs to be more regulated. More advertising regulation seems like a good place to start.
"some gray area" is an understatement.
Sports betting companies structure their odds and order books to disadvantage most bettors. There are plenty of markets where that isn't the case.
I got curious and validated your source [1], to pull the exact quote:
"The proportion of Connecticut gambling revenue from the 1.8% of people with gambling problems ranges from 12.4% for lottery products to 51.0% for sports betting, and is 21.5% for all legalized gambling."
Without going into details, I do have some ability to check if these numbers actually "make sense" against real operator data. Will try to sense-check if the data I have access to, roughly aligns with this or not.
- the "1.8% of people" being problem gamblers does seem roughly correct, per my own experience
- but those same 1.8% being responsible for 51% of sportsbook revenue, does not align with my intuition (which could be wrong! hence why I want to check further...)
- it is absolutely true that sportsbooks have whales/VIPs/whatever-you-call-them, and the general business model is indeed one of those shapes where <10% of the customers account for >50% of the revenue (using very round imprecise numbers), but I still don't think you can attribute 51% to purely the "problem gamblers" (unless you're using a non-standard definition of problem-gambler maybe?)
Whales provide the most value? You don't say.
It’s not whales, it’s compulsives. The stories are horrific. People have moved to non-gambling states, and the casinos send them nice letters saying, “We miss you! Here’s a coupon for a free flight to our state, you don’t even have to promise you’ll gamble, just come and have a steak dinner in us”
Trust me friend, almost nobody WANTS to spend $50k on a mobile game.
The stakes probably aren’t as high in mobile, but it’s otherwise the same dance.
Those people will still gamble if gambling is illegal. Gambling did not start in the 1970s and the primary motivation for making it legal wasn’t revenue it was shutting down revenue streams for organized crime.
> You're saying every last one is a degenerate gambler somehow concealing it totally from me?
A person can be generally responsible while still making decisions that are irresponsible. Gambling has a negative expected value, and so is generally considered to be irresponsible. Gamblers will often counter that they expect to lose their money and consider it to be a form of entertainment, but the whole of the entertainment is in believing that you might get lucky; this is indistinguishable from the motivation of a gambling addict. You don’t see these people taking out $500 in 1s and setting them on fire for fun, even though this is the aggregate outcome of habitual gambling.
Some might protest that all forms of entertainment are like this: You take the $500, take it to a movie theater, and 16 hours later your money is gone and you’ve seen 10 movies. So far as I know, the identification of casual gambling with vice dates back to the Victorian Period. I suspect (but cannot confirm) that the reason gambling was identified as a vice where other forms of comparatively frivolous entertainment were not is due to gambling’s (false) promise of providing money for nothing.
>> Gambling has a negative expected value
Subscribing to Netflix has a negative expected value.
Ban Netflix.
Even more so are restaurants exploiting the public with over priced food compared to cooking at home. Food that is so good that it is addictive.
Restaurants are immoral too since think of the negative health consequences they cause exploiting this situation with their addictive substances. They even put more butter than necessary in the food to make it more addictive.
The wait staff treated literally like servants.
"We should ban everything besides things I personally find enjoyable"
The problem is this: the house always wins. Casinos, online sports books, the lottery, all of it is designed such that all but quite literally a lucky few will lose money. If you understand this properly, then, yes, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it being a form of entertainment, but that means you need to go in thinking about cost per hour instead of any notion of leaving with more than you began with.
This is why I have a huge problem with the recent development of online gambling outlets that you can access via your smartphone. In the past you had to go somewhere to gamble, it was a physical act that provided a barrier to entry. Now? You don't even need to think about it, your bank account is already linked, just spend away!
Personally, I'd rather states loosen laws and allow physical casinos be built and properly regulated than be in the current situation we have with these poorly regulated online money-siphons.
The house does not always win in online sports books. I personally know some quant minded people that have been banned or backed off from a dozen or more online sports books because they are crushed by any nontrivial understanding of price/probability and arbitrage. They do make a lot of money from people who bet for fun or based on their perceived knowledge of the particular sport.
> I personally know some quant minded people that have been banned or backed off from a dozen or more online sports books
That's the house making sure that the house are always the winner.
You just explainer why the house always wins. If they don’t, they will stop taking your bets.
Gambling online would be a lot less destructive if you had to buy a monthly subscription in advance and when you lose that money you are just done.
>every one is a degenerate
Not at all. First, yes, people should be free to make their own choices. But that means making free choices. Just as we don’t allow advertising for cigarettes, we shouldn’t allow advertising for gambling.
Second, there’s a world of difference between “hey, let’s go have a crazy weekend in Vegas” and “I have a blackjack dealer live on my phone 24x7.”
‘Responsible’ gambling is still morally irresponsible. People are walking adverts for their hobbies whether they like it or not, so people who engage with gambling will be indirectly encouraging other people to take up the hobby, many of which will ruin their lives. (Also some fraction of their losses will fund advertising that will similarly attract problem gamblers.) The low stakes recreational gamblers keep the system looking friendly and approachable. This is also almost certainly by design.
Bob and Alice and the eavesdropper is Eve …
What name do we give “the guy who says it’s fine to tear down Chestertons fence” ?
Robert the reformist.
That's like saying drunk gave alcohol a bad name.
It's a net negative for society but we can't simply get rid of it because of the side effect of doing so, particularly since it's so easy to brew alcohol.
He is saying the reponsible reasonable choice is not to gamble. These people are making unreasonable choices.
It was you who brought "degenerate" into it, as if throwing an insult or not made difference in facts.
Also, yes, gamblers hide their addiction. That is normal for gambler and you wont know it. They can be likable people and calling them "degenerate" just makes seeking help harder.
Ah yes, let’s blame it all on the weak-willed addicts… That hasn’t been tried before, and would certainly help.
You can't let society keep inventing new vices for profit in an uninhibited way.
It feels like a bell curve topic, where the most naive people think you should just ban all vices and have a strictly better world, the middle of the road thinks it's all down to personal fortitude, and then people who know how the sausage is made realize the level of asymmetry that exists.
Weed isn't just weed anymore, it's fruity pebbles flavored.
Porn isn't just porn anymore, it tries to talk like a person and build a parasocial relationship.
Video games aren't just video games anymore, they start embedding gambling mechanics and spending 2 years designing the "End of Match" screen in a way that funnels you into the next game or lootbox pull.
You need to stop somewhere. Tech + profit motives create an asymmetric war for people's attention and money that results in new forms of old vices that are superficially the same, but realistically much much worse.
Gambling specifically online might just be giving tech companies too many knobs that are too easy to tune under the umbrella of engagement and retention.
> You can't let society keep inventing new vices for profit in an uninhibited way.
I agree, but:
> It feels like a bell curve topic, where the most naive people think you should just ban all vices and have a strictly better world, the middle of the road thinks it's all down to personal fortitude, and then people who know how the sausage is made realize the level of asymmetry that exists.
There's a wide gap in beliefs of the people who "know how the sausage is made" which is why I'm guessing you didn't ascribe a certain view to them.
Realistically, I think it breaks down into three camps:
1. They agree with the other end of the curve, and think the potential harm is too great.
2. They're in on profiting from it.
3. They are open to people being free to make decisions, but think there needs to be regulations on outright predatory behavior and active enforcement of them
I don't have a problem with anybody choosing to safely engage with recreational drugs, pornography, gambling, alcohol, and a number of other vices - humans have sought these activities out for an extremely long time, and outright banning them simply (as we have seen time and time again) leads to unregulated black markets that are more harmful to society as a whole. But it feels like we've done a complete 180 and now we have barely any regulation where it's needed, late-stage capitalism at its finest.
So many states have put ID verification laws out for accessing pornography, exposing citizens to huge privacy risks in the process, but we've got casino empires draining their savings accounts and can't do anything about it? Please.
I'm ascribing the same level of sentiment to both ends, that's what a bell curve is.
They have different reasons for their disdain, but neither side tends to love it.
In general the more people learn about the process, the more they dislike the current system. There's outliers, but that's why the last decade has mostly been a decline in general sentiment around big tech, and even in the last year AI doomerism is going increasingly mainstream.
Even the people who make these experiences don't do it beliving they're making something enriching. And they're definitely are not clamoring for their own families to grow up on this stuff.
> So many states have put ID verification laws out for accessing pornography, exposing citizens to huge privacy risks in the process, but we've got casino empires draining their savings accounts and can't do anything about it? Please.
That's driven by politicians pandering to the naive side of the bell curve, why are you surprised it's not consistent with what's best for the people?.
Their actions are driven mostly by what looks good at the polls and doesn't hurt their own bottom line too badly.
States are raking in billions of dollars in taxes from gambling, so it's not going to get that treatment.
We’re not supposed to take anything from it, it’s a simple legal liability thing. (And maybe actually mandated by law?) It’s like mandatory workplace trainings: they do almost nothing to prevent people from acting badly, but they let employers say “look we told our employers not to do this!!! it’s not our fault they did it anyway!!”
(More apt comparison is obviously alcohol commercials saying “please drink responsibly”)
Funny you say that as any level of alcohol consumption is bad for your body.
The irony is, if someone already needs help making "responsible choices," they're likely already hooked
I guess it depends on the person. I gamble away exactly ~$3 every month, never felt the need to increase that. I call it "randomness fund"
They are legally required to include that. They don't actually care.
Casinos and gambling institutions absolutely and purposely optimize to attract and capture more problem gamblers.
The evolution of digital slots is a great example of this. An average person could have a little fun with an old fashioned basic slot machine, but the modern ones are so aggressively optimized to trigger addiction and keep addicts going that if you aren't vulnerable, they are massively offputting.
But they don't care, they don't have any desire to serve "Normal" people, and trying to make gambling more fun for people who aren't vulnerable to gambling addiction isn't something they do.
Because nearly all profit comes from addicts.
There's a concept--"making more fun for people who aren't vulnerable to addiction isn't something they do".
I've thought of this often, seeing the state of mobile games. Not fun--they barely have strategy, little choice, and so much copy-cat gambling-machine mechanics.
I used to live in Sri Lanka and one of the most pervasive things I noticed when I moved to the west were all these gambling ads. There, it was widely accepted that gambling was harmful. Yes, you could do it, but you could never advertise it. I'm shocked that my 3rd world country has way better control over this than the west.
I think that's an unfair conclusion towards Sri Lanka, it's not like Western countries are inherently superior. Some things are further developed, some things were lost, and some things just reflect different values.
This is true. Growing up, there was always this ideal that the West was superior ingrained in us (colonial hangover as some put it), and it takes a lot of unlearning to see past it.
Gambling, especially low cost continuous play, can be a symptom of latent mental disease, especially depression or simply low intelligence to conceive the fraud (the company always wins). These people need protection by banning ads for any gambling and provide support and guidance to uncover the scam.
> Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong rattled off crypto buzzwords at the end of the Q3 call, resolving $84K in prediction market bets to "yes."
Polymarket is not even close to the same thing. Sports betting allows a blessed few corporations to run rigged markets and intentionally prevent price discovery by keeping the smart money out.
Polymarket uses open orderbooks where you match against someone else who wants the other side of the trade just like the stock market. Prices are set by the market, as they should be.
Polymarket is like the stock market, that is to say, it's gambling.
Nobody should be day trading unless it's their job. Yes, I have seen many guys get sucked into it.
And people shouldn't be constantly buying mechanical keyboards and keycaps for farming social media karma and affirming their identity when they probably only have a few devices that need keyboards anyway. There's a whole rabbit hole of vice out there if you're interested in looking.
While we're at it, I propose a Board of Ethically Allowed Activities that make sure we can only do the good and moral things.
I'm not saying that we should restrict it. I'm just saying it's not productive or healthy.
The difference is that hobbies are fun. Gambling is fun in the same way smoking is fun. It's not, but you have to do it. I know, because I was a smoker.
Also, on the topic of morality: morality is stupid. Gambling isn't immoral. Or maybe it is, I don't care. Gambling is self destructive. It can pretty much exclusively only make your life worse.
> morality is stupid
least contrarian HN user
> only make your life worse
Unless you have a family with whom your finances are intermingled. This is like saying alcoholism only makes your own life worse, because obviously your actions have no effect on the people around you, right?
You parsed the person you’re responding to wrong. They didn’t say that gambling only affects your life and not anyone else’s, they said it has an exclusively negative outcome and not a positive one.
It’s not that hard to look at lines at Pinnacle and Circa and make estimates about the fair value of a wager. Open accounts at every book and line shop and maximize expected value.
Also you are ignoring platforms like Novig which are like the polymarket for sports betting.
Betting platforms specifically work to identify customers who act in such ways and ban them from the platform. Developing accurate odds costs money, it's cheaper to just identify "advantage bettors" and ban them.
I'm not sure this applies to these prediction markets. Normally when gambling you're at a casino playing e.g. blackjack, where if you're winning more often than expected you're taking the house's money.
But this is more like playing poker, where overall the casino could care less if you're continuously crushing the other players, as long as people keep turning up to play and they keep getting a rake.
There is no comparison. A quick search about Pinnacle: https://www.reddit.com/r/sportsbook/comments/kek5t8/warning_...
My experience (though I have never bet on these platforms) is that Pinnacle-like platforms almost never let you withdraw your "earnings". They are essentially a bookie.
Polymarket on the other hand, is just an exchange. And they use Defi to make sure you can always withdraw your bounty even if you get "front-end" banned from their platform.
So to affirm the previous poster: These companies are not in the same business.
That is completely wrong. Who is the other peer in your transaction on Polymarket or Kalshi?
Susquehanna. Jane Street. Two Sigma.
It's not some rando two towns over. The PMs get paid to front run access to these market makers, who crush the retail bettor, er, predictor.
What do you mean here by front run? Don't most of these exchanges use normal limit books with visible resting orders available to trade against?
My understanding was that these shops were acting more as market makers, with the idea of guaranteeing liquidity and tight spreads in some number of markets.
If you think the listed bid-ask spread is mispriced you're more than welcome to move the market to whatever price you think is more appropriate.
Yes they act as MMs. There's only so much edge they can get in prediction markets from their money skills alone.
Wasn't this posted a minute ago and on the front page?
Am I going crazy, or was it just... disappeared from there??
On a somewhat related note, there seems to be a huge interest in vice policing on social media. Gambling, sex, drugs, these are some of humanity's oldest vices. Why has it become so popular on social media to highlight these, along with a narrative of social or cultural decline?
Think of it in terms of public health not morality. Heart disease is one of humanities oldest killers but we still want to fix it. We also dont want to ban deep friers as we value freedom. Similar for gambling. We do want to discuss what to do when vice becomes no longer nice.
This is actually a good example of what I mean. Heart disease is meticulously studied. Its incidence is tracked tracked. It has longitudinal studies. Its mechanisms are explored. It has peer reviewed studies discussing interventions. Doctors talk all the time about the tradeoffs their patients can make to decrease their chances of getting heart disease.
What it has a lot less of is random public policy influencers writing polemics about it. There's some, sure, and that's exactly where RFK and the MAHA coalition come from. But professionals don't treat MAHA and their blogs as coda. So why do we do the same for anything related to money?
I think part of it is just every change in something, there is strong push back until we establish good equilibrium as society.
With Sport Betting, throwing advertisements and having bets talked about by sports analysts during the game is starting to be seen as bad thing because it's seen as really bad habit, like smoking and maybe society should attempt to regulate it better.
Yeah I'm a fan of normalizing but regulating gambling more. Restrictions on bets for EV and variance. Disclosure limitations. Age verification. That kind of thing.
And the fourth oldest vice is gossip, the original social media, talking trash while you pick bugs out of your friend's hair
1. People who have problems themselves love seeing others have more serious problems. Sex addicts think "at least I'm not a gambling addict". Gambling addicts think "at least I'm not a drug addict".
2. Fear is the emotion that's easiest to trigger because before modernity, life was indeed quite dangerous. You can make shitload of money by making people feel scared.
3. It is true that for many people, the society got worse, and they want to know why.
Standard bible thumping. You will notice that there is also an emphasis on traditional family values as well both in the media and in the positions of politicians.
I guess it's been interesting watching this become popular in secular, lefty circles rather than the historically religious right circles I see this from.
The mainstream left (really a centrist party) might be nominally secular but not really removed from conservative religious values. E.g. consider treatment of gay people in the media vs actual gay culture. In the media it is always a happy monogamous couple where one of the gays is clearly masculine and the other is clearly more effeminate. In reality gay culture is far more complicated than that, with many engaging in polyamorous relationships and/or routine clubbing for example that you won't ever see celebrated in this way in the mainstream media, which sees that sort of behavior as immoral just as a religious person might.
I'd hate to get all true scotsman but a true leftist would never preach for prohibition as a solution for vice.
> I'd hate to get all true scotsman but a true leftist would never preach for prohibition as a solution for vice.
That's what happens when you squash a multi-dimensional space of political beliefs down into a single dimension of left-right. You can't have a meaningful discussion about anything from this starting point.
Viewed from a 2-dimensional spectrum this problem lies on the social authoritarian-libertarian axis, not the economic left-right axis.
I'd consider myself a "true leftist" and while I don't think prohibition usually works, I also don't believe in absolutes of liberalism where everything goes - where corner shops can sell heroin and if you fall into addiction that's just your own moral failing.
I support individuals' freedom to use drugs in a controlled, responsible manner, but there need to be limits somewhere to protect naive individuals from getting themselves into something they'll regret and to protect society from collapsing.
I think the centrist vs leftist distinction isn't particularly interesting for me in this instance because that's a discussion that feels more relevant at a political party level for me. In the US, the Democrats as a party are center-left.
But the audience for these anti-vice takes seems to be "lefty" people. Both center-left folks and also leftists. I see plenty of folks on Bluesky who want a socialist revolution tomorrow that also want to ban gambling.
> In the US, the Democrats as a party are center-left.
The case of US Democrats is an example of how useless the 1-dimensional classification is. They can be very socially progressive which would seem to put them well into the "left-wing" territory, but economically they're in the right-wing territory.
Economically speaking, a candidate like Sanders (considered to be too radical even by the Democrats and painted as an extremist by the Republicans) would be considered centrist/centre-left in most of Europe. He supports single payer healthcare and policies that would strengthen worker protections and improve the social safety net, but he doesn't fundamentally oppose capitalism. That's the status quo in most of Europe.
Ok great, now do other continents? I'm not sure what the obsession I often read is comparing politics with other Continents, not countries.
There are some EU laws that are more conservative and some that are less, proponents of policies often cherry-pick the ones that match their ideology leaving out others. Even worse is they ignore the problems that the policies they agree with are causing those countries, but ends-justify-means.
We're not discussing whether policies are good or bad, just where they happen to sit on the political spectrum. If you feel like something material is missing, add it, I can't read your mind.
Did you read the article?
What happened to America. Maybe 70's or 40's were it's peak. Every activity has become a betting. Investments, sports, relationships, home-buying.
Addictions are a symptom of having an excessive amount of free time, floating money and lack of fear of reprisal from family and society and lack of basic wisdom.
Excessive prosperity breaks social rythm. It removes dependencies and relations across individuals. It's like a tree turned into chips, with freedom for every chip. As individuals, you won (materialistic luxury etc), but as a family, community or country, you fail.
Excessive prosperity is one phrase for it. Another is kleptocracy, politics have been co-opted by money and those who have it now control 99% of US society.
Those who have no prosperity are often the ones gambling, not the rich. When SS checks come in, our local casino fills with chain smoking seniors pulling levers on the slot with all their retirement security. It’s a sad addiction.
I think part of the issue is how connected we all are. At one point you could be a company that did interesting things in a small market and everything was fine because it was hard for competitors to expand globally. Now you cannot stay in business if you are not expanding to large volumes and squeezing the supply chain. Think of companies like United Rentals that bought every small rental company.
So to avoid the suffering of gambling we need to simply suffer and toil so much in day to day existence that we don't have the capacity to engage with anything else?
Notice that whenever anything happens in the US, especially on the negative side, the first question that pops up is usually "How will this affect the stock market?".
The 70's were an economic horror show, Richard Nixon, and a legitimate fear of nuclear war; the 40's were a global war. Weird take.
Well, that kept you folks together atleast, and kept you focused on things that were not betting.
don't forget college major... plastics
> Addictions are a symptom of having an excessive amount of free time, floating money and lack of fear of reprisal from family and society and lack of basic wisdom.
Sure, or any of the other million reasons people get addicted, like despair, or other healthier activities being too expensive. Super weird take.
Explain why there were hardly any addicts among peasant communities in rural third world countries back in the 70's or 80's.
You don't think they had alcoholics? Why?
What are you talking about, alcoholism is a classic rampant poverty addiction?
From what I saw, there was no "alcohol" as you know it. Most peasant families consumed something called toddy that came from palm trees and date palms. It's a family drink and it's nowhere close to what you call as addiction.
Palm wine addicts have existed since pre history. Or banana beer, or other forms of wine, etc. But distilleries existed virtually everywhere by the 70s.
But even putting that aside, gluttons, drunkards, and gamblers are certainly ancient and well attested, certainly in the western (abrahamic/hellenic) tradition. Perhaps there are some societies without this but it not poverty or want or lack of abundance that provides relief.
The assertion is that
>there were hardly any addicts among peasant communities in rural third world countries back in the 70's or 80's.
Are you sure the assertion is wrong?
How do you know?
"I grew up in a rural setting in the third world," would be a great answer.
Eh?
Theres too many moving parts in your very short paragraph, to actual engage with without any substantial engagement being minced into woodchips, I fear.
Theres many things that have happened since the 40s, just to name ONE thing that has resulted in this - we have much better psychological technology than we did ever before. Skinnerian conditioning, reward schedules, their results - we never had that.
MS Excel alone would mean we better ways for the statistically inclined to zero in on more attractive addictions, just through better data analysis.
Just consider how common place and obvious A/B testing is. How do you think humanity will fare on average, against industrial strength siren songs?
In the din of industrial strength siren songs, you may have not noticed the rot that is accumulating in the society. MS Excel exists only because you have some data that you think you should care about and you can't fit in your mind. As an individual, you shouldn't need that much data to handle.
The accumulated social rot is not compensated by Excel sheets or any gadget toys, you call as tech.
Isn’t everything deceptive? Isn’t every thing that produces a dopaminergic burst addictive? Should we dismantle and ban fast food? Social media? Fried food? Everything is coercive. You want a cure; force feed people mindfulness and psychology. All commercials are potentially coercive and deceptive. I’m watching a Walgreens commercial; there is no line in the commercial, the person behind the pharmacy is smiling and happy, no one else is in the store, the “paid for” actor leaves the pharmacy happy. This just seem like the reality of any Walgreens I’ve visited. But I digress; my argument for addiction markets as a recovering alcoholic… I grew more as a human from the experience of addiction and recovery than any other day to day mundane dopamine driven activity. Sometimes we need to fall to get back up. It makes us stronger, we learn to ask for help.
If everything is coercive - Yes.
Your definition of coercive is too permissive, so it ends up being more of an ideological stance, but its a saturday, so its a fun argument to work through.
If something is coercive, its inherently aiming to generate an unfair transaction. That means we need to spend a ton of effort on forums where such unfair transacations can be reversed, and punitive measures applied.
Otherwise we are always going to fail as a society, simply because coercive technqiues will be the default. Any new business, discovery, or product which provides a net benefit without defending itself from predatory practices will be torpedoed. resulting in a moribund economy and culture.
Having gone through what you have, I suspect you quietly prefer people learning from your example, over discovering the same lessons by following in your foot steps.
Personal choice is when it just exists, like Las Vegas in Nevada.
If you really really want to gamble then go, travel to Nevada and do it.
The problem is sticking their filthy ads and purchased propagandists into the faces of vulnerable people and society at large.
Preying on victims over the phone, soc. media ads, bought manipulators so called influencers with no morale.
I sure did have to scroll down to find the best comment - appreciate that you were willing to make it.
If you think this is bad, have you noticed fast food? It's engineered to be addictive, the cause of obesity and diabetes epidemics, and they're allowed to advertise everywhere.
What is it about gambling that people find bad while other advertising for harmful stuff gets a free pass?
The problem isn't the 70M people who placed bets, its the ~25M with broken risk aversion.
These are mostly men, and a very specific type of men. You can try to curtail their access to gambling but we're missing the underlying problem.
Has society ever addressed an underlying psychological problem successfully?
Because when it comes to the underlying psychological causes of homelessness and drug addiction and school shootings and violent extremism my impression is we don’t really do much.
Do all of these occur with equal proportion in every country/culture?
I am not sure what you are saying with homelessness...it isn't some massive baffling issue, someone who doesn't have a house, needs a house so build a house? School shootings...I don't understand how anyone can believe this is normal?
The US has fairly obvious social problems, these essentially inhibit the functional resolution of most of these problems you list. However, gambling is not like this, the solution to problem gambling is (obviously) regulating gambling so that it is possible for the government to control people's behaviour. Simple.
Homelessness? Build houses. Drug addiction? Get people clean, harsh sentences for dealing. School shootings? No guns. Violent extremism? Jail. These aren't real problems. Most of the world does not have issues with this stuff (I will accept through drug usage in the US appears to be so ingrained in culture, that it would never be possible for anyone to do anything to fix it...the solutions are known however). It is only over the last ten years or so where government has appeared totally unable to do anything because of paralyzing social discord.
It's a classic way of sweeping problems under the rug. Imagine you're a cynical politician.
A school shooting happens. You don't want to ban guns. So you say "switzerland doesn't have this problem, we need to address the mental health issues that are driving these young men to kill" as a distraction. Nobody's got a workable plan to do that, so you do nothing - which is what you wanted to begin with.
There are lots of rough sleepers. You don't want to build more houses. So you say "many homeless people are estranged from their support network by mental health issues and addiction, we need to address this underlying cause" as a distraction. Nobody's got a workable plan to do that, so you do nothing.
I'd rather we actually deal with the issues causing these things than sweep them under the rug and pretend like it's an actual solution.
> Build houses.
That doesn't solve homelessness, as we build many houses in America but they aren't being filled with the homeless. You need to apply social services in a complex systematic approach to provide housing that people can afford sustainably, and rehabilitate and integrate people into society. You might think that is a bit of a bad faith "gotcha" like, of course you have to make the housing free and ensure homeless people know it's available. But it's not a small detail to elide, even in context, and doing so is exactly why your thinking is off-base. You haven't even begun to unpack it properly, putting aside the falsehoods. Think about it, what do you do if someone doesn't want to accept the housing for complex reasons like pride or embarrassment? What if it's some crust punk kid riding suicide as a rite of passage? You have to deal with a lot of that! You can't just ignore it!
> Get people clean, harsh sentences for dealing.
Punitive measures have proven to be a complete and total failure globally. Even in Asia, where penalties on all sides of the drug trade are high, drug usage is very easy to find and rising. I say this as someone connected to Asia and with a fair amount of "street smarts" that some seem to lack. Japan and Korea don't even try to hide it anymore. Chinese cities are kept clean through a complex system of travel controls and consistent policing to sweep things under the rug. It's easy to score if you pass as Chinese outside of the tier 1 and 2 cities though. Even Saudi Arabia is flooded with black market drugs if you know where to look. Punitive measures empirically do not work.
> Violent extremism? Jail
Where is that not the case? Like what are you talking about? Do you know how common attempted domestic terrorism was against the US power grid and cell towers in 2020/2021? No, you don't. Almost nobody does, and certainly nobody has an exact number. That's because it was kept very quiet and the thousands of incidents were suppressed from the media cycle while the people involved were quietly thrown into the maximum security incarceration hole never to be seen again.
The person you're replying to is right. These issues are solved, and it means looking at why people want to do any of this to begin with and addressing that. You cut it off at the behavioral source. Think of it like this, do you check every pointer before you dereference it? No. You avoid bad pointer dereferences primarily through proper structure of your code.
You almost tap into this with being cognizant of the fact that it's not universal. It depends greatly on the country and culture. Because some countries and cultures have done a much better job at building worthwhile, healthy societies than others.
Yes, building houses actually solves homelessness. Housing prices are the best predictor of homelessness and of course increasing supply of a good decreases its price. Why does the law of supply and demand not apply to housing? Sometimes the solution is very very simple and not at all complicated. Just build more.
> thousands of incidents were suppressed from the media cycle
Where can I read more about this?
I'm not aware of any good reading material on it, and that's probably intentional. The FERC mentions the rise in power grid attacks somewhat in their annual report of 2023[1]. The incidents are underreported officially, and don't include police/FBI raids intercepting conspiracies, nor do they include the wave of attacks on cell towers. I only know about it because I spent quarantine in a community that had a nationwide dragnet of scanners listening exclusively for this stuff.
[1] - https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2023-05/23_Summer-A...
Absolutely. A lot of it is upsettingly simple; make a given population wealthy, well-educated, with a strong community and you will slash rates of these issues tenfold. My home state of New Hampshire is one of the wealthiest, best-educated states in the US and despite easy access to tons of dangers (unlimited gun access, some of the cheapest vodka prices in the Western world, legal gambling, et cetera) we have low rates of the associated disorders. The NH homicide rate is on par with much of Europe, for example, nearly unheard of for a US state.
I'm an optimist at heart, but this subject is dear to me, and my opinion may seem pessimistic: the short answer is, no, it cannot be fixed at any large scale, at least not in a lifetime.
Large-scale societal change requires generations of work, indeed. That may be disheartening, but it is the way it is, and we should continue to work toward those changes.
Anti-Smoking, especially in teenagers, seems to have been successful.
Only if you don't count weed.
Vaping is counteracting that somewhat. (There's the perception among many kids that vaping is deeply uncool – and they'd be correct – but that's not something we can rely on.)
That's still an overall win, as vaping is less harmful than smoking.
Yep. Generational memory is short. Eventually our kids or our kids kids will try whatever smoking’s been rebranded to just to spite the adults. And the cycle begins anew.
Housing prices are the strongest predictor of homelessness. Therefore, homelessness is not a moral failure of homeless individuals but of the NIMBY vetocracy that is the housing market.
These gambling businesses specifically target that 25M. You absolutely can make that much harder for businesses to do, and it will significantly reduce downstream misery.
This is the logic behind the war on drugs and we all saw how that turned out. Obviously there's nuance to be had as I think some vices, in both type and magnitude, are worse/more destructive than others. But crusades against vice rarely turn out well. Instead you'll see the same people huddled around in underground betting rooms and backroom card game tables where organized crime or just other muscle-for-hire are ready to break your knees for not paying your debt back.
There has to be more options than just the two you reference... not saying it’s easy, but we can’t just throw our hands up.
Yes but this article isn't it.
Using ideologically charged words like "corporate gambling" and "neoliberal origins" are fun ways to get the moral outrage going of market skeptics but they don't lead to good policy.
The boring answer is you need to look at how the owner of these instruments (since that's what most of these are) are making money. In the same way that a regulated exchange makes sure you're not dumping garbage onto order books, you need to make sure that the bets are fair and that there's generally positive EV. Prediction markets are a good example of this that isn't predatory but sports books are. Unfortunately this article, as is usual for most of the moral outrage genre, doesn't make this distinction.
Dude, the war on gambling was going fine before it was legalized nationwide like 2 years ago. We don't have to have long memories to remember a time before omnipresent sports betting! It was fine!
Sports betting is only one form of gambling, so I have no idea what you're talking about. This article, like your post it seems, is conflating the two and mixing in vague assertions of corporations and whatnot to add a layer of emotion that serves more to manipulate than to elucidate.
There's always been gambling in my lifetime. There's been legal ones like Indian Casinos and Vegas. Then there's been the below board ones, the private blackjack games, the mahjong parlors in shady parts of town, lottery players (it's okay if the government profits off the losers I guess lol), etc
If this article were talking about banning sports books and adding in regulation around retail betting then sure that would be a fun discussion. But hyperbole like the article and your copious use of exclamation points doesn't inspire confidence.
The very recent complete nationwide legalization of sports betting is most of what people are mad about.
That's not what the article and a lot of commenters here are saying though. The article makes vague insinuations about "corporate gambling".
If you're just targeting sports books I think other than the folks making money from the industry, you'll find few fans. They offer predatory parlays with often outright negative EV or very high variance returns. They kick sophisticated money out they can find edges. They leave no room for above board players like market makers providing liquidity through efficiency.
I think a better article and discussion could emerge from just tackling the harms of sports books.
Fyi, the Supreme Court case that opened the floodgates for sports gambling was decided in May 2018, 7.5 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...
Yes, yes, referring to 7.5 as 2 is something called hyperbole.
I would not call the California strategy on drugs a success.
I would entertain the possibility that there are at least some who cannot or will not avoid that kind of destructive behavior. The only thing you can do for them is deny access. I know that nobody asked for a lecture on 12 step, but number one is an admission that you do not have control.
Do you enable the majority who can manage risk, knowing some will be destroyed by it or deny it to everyone to protect the minority who can’t?
I believe there are studies which show men are more likely to have problems with sports betting, but women are with slot machines. My anecdotal evidence (and it's bordering on statistically significant...) is that these studies are correct.
> > The problem is the ~25M with broken risk aversion.
Problem for you maybe. A life lived in fear is not worth living at all
> These are mostly men, and a very specific type of men. You can try to curtail their access to gambling but we're missing the underlying problem.
You should address that too, but gambling is frankly a parasitic business meant to exploit such people, and we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good by avoiding the re-abolishment of such a pernicious industry.
sure, and that should be addressed. But in the meantime, we shouldn't be making it easier for them to engage in that behavior and we shouldn't be making it easier for people to encounter industrialized gambling for the first time who would otherwise find the process too laborious to seek out on a whim.
In 30 years they'll be a huge liability for the state. In the past, they used to send them to meat grinders (wars). Somehow later it was figured out that a mandatory cut of their paycheck will give them a small payment later in their retirement years. But now that social security is broken (both in the US and Europe) and short-term thinking is the norm, every "business men" is salivating at the opportunity.
In a couple decades, they'll be a massive drag on society and could even collapse countries. France is kind of a good example of how that future will look like.
Well, sure, but it is unlikely that we can fix the underlying problem: the science of psychology is not advanced enough.
I don't think you can kill corporate run gambling - people will just use some offshore website instead.
It might be something we should treat more like smoking.
- Require a disclosure of the EV of each bet as the user is placing it. E.g.: Expected loss $5.
- Ad targeting restrictions.
> people will just use some offshore website instead
No they won't, because moving real money to and from these shady offshore websites is a nightmare, and without enforcement there will be too much fraud in the system for the vast majority of regular people to bother.
Gambling is so prevalent today because 1) there is incessant advertising, including being overlaid on the game you are watching and 2) it is convenient, taking like 3 clicks and under a minute to go from scratch to placing bets. You can even use Apple Pay. Take away either of these and participation rates will plummet.
You don't even need to speculate, just look at the numbers. There were countless illegal and gray market gambling options available a decade ago, both online and in-person. How many people were participating back then? I personally didn't know anyone who bet on games outside of maybe the occasional trip to Vegas, and that too was just for the novelty of it. Today >50% of adults in the US are regularly betting online, and the number is growing every year.
I think you’re right - some people will gamble no matter what, but removing all barriers to entry and advertising it on ESPN will certainly grow that market much more than people actively seeking out betting in shady places online.
It’s similar to weed legalization 10 years ago. Yes, it’s now much less likely that your weed will be spiked with meth or you will be robbed by your dealer, but also like 1000% more of the population smokes weed now and it has some bad social side effects that people don’t like to think about.
I think in both cases, as with prohibition, making something commonplace illegal again tends to make people do crazy things if they’re addicted, and I’d bet gambling is no different
This is not a hypothetical, people already do it like that in my country (Argentina), you send your money to a person that buys tokens using cryptocoins, since these websites don't comply with the local regulation, even kids are addicted to gambling.
When your government is as incompetent as you can get while avoiding a revolution people start to gamble.
The rise of gambling in the US does indicate an economic hopelessness that mirrors Argentina, but it’s not quite to the same level yet.
People buy illegal stuff and dark markets all the time. Even a decade ago I knew a guy who was buying dope and having it mailed to him from the dark web and he was minimally technical. They know there is a risk but they are willing to take it. This isn’t like buying a lawn motor - people will take some fraud as “acceptable losses”.
We are not talking about one person. Yes everyone "knows a guy" who will find ways of doing stuff regardless of the laws or availability. We don't need to care about that person. However if half of America is becoming that person then we absolutely need to care.
You're fighting anecdote with anecdote. Earlier you say back in the gray market days you knew nobody gambling in your circle. Now you're saying the other commenter's "one person" isn't representative. You can't have it both ways. Either both anecdotes need more data to support them or neither do.
I think the difference is that, with gambling, the "buying" part IS the addiction. It's money centered. But with dope, the "buying" part is nothing - you do it for the dope.
If I give out free dope, I'll get a lot of people hooked. If I give out free sports betting, but you get nothing, then nobody is hooked.
This is a problem that literally had minimal societal consequences just a few years ago before the 2018 supreme court ruling[1]. I don't see why we shouldn't just try to move the laws back to how things were in 2017.
Source 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...
You can't kill murder; murder will always exist.
Surely, like murder, and other negative outcome behaviors, we can reduce the occurrences, right?
If murder was legal, surely the amount of murders would increase.
Yeah. Just like we do for smoking. I don't think I get your point. Are you agreeing with the prior commenter?
I'd ban all advertisement and put a market cap on these companies before mandatory breakups happens.
None of these companies should be worth a billion dollars.
My big fear is these companies are all getting rich which means they'll be able to buy political influence.
I'm pretty tolerant of a lot of vices. I also don't really have a problem with low levels of gambling. But the way these companies are setup is just sick. It's abusive the the public and erosive to society in general.
Even in your comment you can see the challenge with education and gambling. In practice the return on a dollar (just a different formulation of EV) is often legally mandated to be something around 0.9 and for many games is very close to fair.
But variance, not expectation, is where casinos get their edge. The “Gambler’s ruin”[0] demonstrates that even in a fair game the Casino will win due to their effectively infinite bankroll compared to the player.
You can also simulate this yourself in code: have multiple players with small bankrolls play a game with positive EV but very high variance. You’ll find that the majority of players still lose all their money to the casino.
You can also see this intuitively: Imagine a game with a 1 in a million chance to win 2 million dollars, but each player only has a $10 bankroll. You can easily see that a thousand people could play this game and the house would still come out ahead despite the EV being very much in the players favor.
If that were the case then the SCOTUS decision legalizing it nationwide would not have been as impactful as it was.
> I don't think you can kill corporate run gambling - people will just use some offshore website instead.
You can block it at payment rails. The reasonable amount of avoidance of controls around gambling laws is not zero [1]. You're making it hard for all but the most determined, who are free to lose it all.
[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... (Control-F "This extends beyond payments") Broadly speaking, we are not "solving" gambling with these ideas; we are, as a society and sociopolitical economic system, pulling levers to arrive at the intersection of harm reduction and rights impairment. Some gambling, but only so much, for most but not all.
(work in finance, risk management, fintech/payments, etc)
As someone who believes in legalizing all drugs and in general "personal freedoms", I'd add recreational drugs to this list.
The demand will always be there but there should be strong incentives to not incentivize use (e.g., the Purdue Pharma debacle). We're better served by having these markets addressed by legit players rather then criminal cartels.
I'm not sure what the best solution is, but unfettered promotion to consume is not the way.
On the other hand, legit players can lobby for their interests, whereas criminal cartels generally can’t.
Gamblers know the odds are stacked against them yet they end up stuck in a psychological prison within their own brain that they can't escape from even if they realize what they do is harmful.
Maybe a better law: check id, you are not allowed to take from any gambler more than 10 bets a year and no bet can be over 1k.
For big gamblers, we can have "qualified gamblers" rules like we do for qualified investors.
Funny how we don't let average people invest in some stuff but we let them gamble.
For offshore gambling pursue them aggressively if they serve US clients.
>For big gamblers, we can have "qualified gamblers" rules like we do for qualified investors.
This is actually a take I haven't seen elsewhere. Yes, we do protect investors at least marginally better (lots of people still get fleeced with little recourse, unfortunately) but conceptually, this is a very interesting idea.
The fact that gambling exists on a loophole of being "for entertainment purposes only"[0] isn't a good enough distinction to me.
[0]: This is a brief one sentence summary of it. There's actually a bit of nuance involved depending on a number of factors, but essentially the core presume rests on some version of this.
His take isn't new. It is deployed in part in the UK. Effectively, gambling companies adopt the role of the state conducting a full audit into your personal circumstances, income, assets, bank statement, utility bills to work out whether you can gamble.
I would hope that I don't need to explain why this isn't a good idea. But the one you may not have thought of: gambling companies love this because small companies are unable to audit, margins in the sector collapsed when activity moved online, that has stopped AND they are able to target customers who they don't want to deal with, before these rules it was difficult to identify customers who would take their money, now they have your passport, your address, your bank statements, they know where your money comes from (professional gamblers can still use beards but in the UK, students used to be very popular beards...that has stopped, regulators have also brought in rules to prevent beards being used as part of the changes above...the "neoliberal" US doesn't have rules anywhere close to this, it is complete madness).
There's a difference here between the concept and implementation though.
I agree, giving up that much information to a third party, opens too many risks for me, and I don't want it to be standard.
However, I'm sure there is some middle ground here that isn't so violating to your privacy. Like mentioned before, having a default limit that can only be surpassed if you're willing to go through some form of qualification. The limit can be set in place without any audit required, if its low enough.
Why go through all this effort just to enable an industry that does nothing but take a profit off of random chance?
Just fucking ban it.
Decriminalize low value bets between average people maybe but there's zero reason we need a gambling industry.
It is impossible for this industry to behave. Just kill it.
Your average Fent dealer isn't this predatory FFS
Gamblers know the odds are stacked against them and still gamble...because it is fun.
You realise that people waste their money on things that are significantly less understandable than gambling. Do you see someone driving a Ferrari and seethe with rage because Ferrari doesn't run a "qualified driver" program?
Ferrari cars hold their value pretty well if you buy them slightly used.
Either way, Ferrari is selling cars. Not dreams of riches.
I am a semi-professional gambler, based in the UK. To parse that statement: I have a day job; I make about as much income from software that trades on betting exchanges as I do from the day job, except that income is tax free (because UK law does not recognise it as a taxable trade - another debate); and I spend a lot of time watching, reading and understanding changes in the gambling industry because a significant chunk of my savings income comes from it.
The UK went through almost everything the US is going through right now some years ago, where problem gambling led to suicides and people struggling to pay bills. Multiple measures have been taken that seem to have directly helped that situation: VIP programs have been scrapped; advertising is being limited; and, you may have to prove you can afford to bet the levels you're betting at to an operator, which is an incredibly unpopular move (who wants to send their pay slips to their bookie?), but does seem to have quelled things a little.
However there is more to do, and there is something you can do right now if you are losing money and want to reduce the impact these products have on you.
Stop playing casino and video slot games. Focus on sports only.
The myth is that the problem gamblers are losing their money on 2nd Division Nigerian netball games in the middle of the night. Yes, there are some people who are looking for sports action all the time, but that's not the biggest source of problems.
With sports, you have a little time to think. I recommend not playing in-play unless you have automated that solution to find EV and its executing for you (I know people who make money doing this on Betfair in the UK). Bet before game only, and you will have a built-in "cool off" period.
You don't get that with casino games or video slots. Its relentless, and you can lose thousands an hour before you even realise what is happening.
And then, there's EV. Expected Value. Sometimes (actually, kinda often), the odds a bookmaker puts up are a bit wrong.
Not every price, it might be a prop bet on a particular player, and they're putting a price up on a Monday for a Saturday game, and you have a spreadsheet that dings something and tells you what the kelly stake should be and you put 1% of your bankroll on it, and then you might sell it back on Saturday morning when the market has got right or you let it ride (and there's maths to tell you when to do that and when not), and you ride some variance but make money.
That's not possible on casino or video slot games. They just bleed you. There is no EV. If you win, you got lucky (the scientific name for this is "experienced positive variance"), and you should run away quickly before you lose it back. But the sure way to win on those games is the same as in Wargames: don't play at all.
I'm biased, I realise that, but I would love to see the outlawing of casino and slot games on mobile.
I would also like to see more education in schools around probability and statistics (the founder of SIG, a storied institution who is now a market maker on Kalshi, the prediction market platform), argues that the fascination with calculus in schools might have helped during the space race, but today we need people to really understand Bayes theorem more than anything else. I agree.
If you want to start your own education in how to bet a little smarter and lose a little less, I can recommend The Logic of Sports Betting [0] and its sequel Interception [1]. I also like Dan Abrams' book [2], that talks about expected growth, not just exepcted value.
These are not get rich quick schemes, but it will give you an idea of what goes on in the minds of people who try and take this all very seriously. You'll still need to think about modelling and how to get your own prices to compare with those you're being offered, but if you're not prepared to do that work, what is it you're actually doing?
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Sports-Betting-Ed-Miller/dp/109...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Interception-Secrets-Modern-Sports-Be...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/But-How-Much-Did-Lose-ebook/dp/B0DRZ2...
Once they identify you as a consistent winner with EV>0 they ban you from their business. Happens also with government owned gambling companies.
What a bunch of fearful people in the comments.
Gambling , especially in person gambling such as poker is basically a toned down version of combat sports where you are socially allowed to take something from somebody else because the other person accepted the conditions by sitting at the table or entering the casino.
Much like a boxer accepts the risk when they enter the ring.
The same thing happens on your beloved stock market, you just don't see it.
“Take athletics. Americans love sports, and that cultural centerpiece is being corrupted in an orgy of greed and speculative ferver.”
Professional (and collegiate) athletics has always been corrupt - now it’s just more visible.
The only thing needing abolishing is the advertising of gambling.
Say it ain’t so Joe
What really struck me is how gambling has quietly become infrastructure. That's a deeply unsettling shift.
Meanwhile Mr POTUS himself wants to introduce prop betting in his social media platform.
Don’t expect anything to change anytime soon
The president wants to let people gamble on election results on a platform he owns.
Which is a fun novel conflict of interest because he’s also ultimately the executive in charge of making sure national elections are properly conducted.
Since this is the direction America is going, why not have judges take bets on the outcome of trials? Would be a nice income stream for them, and it would save taxpayer money when judges don’t need to be paid anymore.
How about we treat people like adults?
Just ban advertising and let me gamble.
This is a horribly written article littered with logical fallacies. Nearly every point is just a random fact about gambling that doesn’t add to the argument.
- fanduel owns networks. So what?
- gambling taxes = corporate taxes in MD. This is misleading as state level corporate are effectively $0
- 20% of Americans have placed a bet. So?
I have never done sports gambling myself but this article fails to convince that it’s a problem
It's quite reactionary to label betting as addiction markets. I see little reason to draw that corollary to other, often detested, vices.
To label such activity as a tax on the poor is nothing more than a euphemism. I understand what is being said by the verbiage "tax" in this context. Although no real tax is voluntary.
Labeling this as an issue that disproportionately affects poor is misleading. This is an issue for a few select individuals who make poor decisions. The correlation for poor decisions and lower disposable income is higher than the contrary.
Wealthy by all means have the ability to wager more than they can afford. Often times, they wager significantly higher than average income individuals; however, they stay within their means
We should do licenses for gambling that cap betting at some percentage of your income or wealth. For example: you earn 50k annually, you get to gamble 250 or 0.5%.
There is a Chinese term called 'porn gambling drugs business'. And these businesses will always be lucrative
Matt Stoller is an idiot, but it's hard to disagree with the thesis.
Nice try MGM Grand.
That's good thinking
Listen kids, your dopamine circuits are beyond screwed up already. All this is designed to aggregate capital… into crypto ecosystem
I don’t have an overly paternalistic view of the government. I’m rather libertarian in that regard. But is it too much to ask that we place some guardrails on things that are know to have trouble with? Smoking, drinking, gambling, etc.
I certainly feel that people should be able to do it if they really want to, but making it super accessible and highly advertised seems like a bad idea.
Agreed. Aside from actions that harm others (like theft, murder, etc.) the government shouldn’t be policing what individuals do. But it should absolutely protect the citizenry from malicious businesses whether it be praying on addictions like gambling and smoking, data privacy, polluting communities, and any other antisocial behaviors that harm the people.
Very contradictory statement.
How so?
There are guardrails. Gambling is legalised to introduce guardrails so that regulated providers can exist and provide a product that stops people using offshore.
Neither accessibility or advertising impacts rates of addiction. It is a real addiction. Does a lack of advertising stop heroin use? Behave.
So the number of smoking addicts magically went down over the last few decades?
If advertising didn’t work to drive consumption no business would ever spend a dime on it. When your product has addictive qualities advertising absolutely increases the number of people that get hooked. This is something that was well understood in the past, for example the huge curtailment in cigarette advertising.
I want to chime in not necessarily to disagree but there is a lot of unknowns in how effective advertising really is and in a lot of cases, if it is at all.
Additionally, the curtailment of cigarette advertising wasn't because it was understood to be bad, it was because a bunch of politicians found it to be politically beneficial to "do something" so they threw everything at the wall. Increased taxes, counter advertisement, advertising bans, smoking bans in certain places, required packaging, etc. Who knows what actually worked, if any of it did.
We're seeing a big decline in alcohol consumption right now in younger generations right now and none of those things were done to cause it.
I am really tired of the lazy argument style of using "corporate" as a synonym for "bad". I too think it's bad to encourage addictive gamblers. I don't care if it is corporate, individual, or state run.
Matt Stoller is a leftist and views everything through that lens. I agree the framing is unfortunate. On the other hand, if you ignore the unnecessary "corporate" part, he's basically right.
> A quarter of bettors can’t pay a bill because of their wagers, a third have gambling debts, more than half carry credit card debts, and a quarter of them are afraid they can’t control their gambling.
No way. It's almost like these are addictive products being engineered to be as addictive as possible and deliberately punch people's brains in such a way to make them stay. That's so weird.
>> addictive products being engineered to be as addictive as possible and deliberately punch people's brains in such a way to make them stay
The exact same argument could be used to make social media illegal.
Hopefully, the responses to this have highlighted the kind of people you are dealing with.
No-one can use social media because some people in our society can't control themselves. Socialise the losses.
You can allow freedom of communication while restricting the algorithms that have poisoned an entire generation of children.
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2025/05/430011/yes-social-media-mi...
> Hopefully, the responses to this have highlighted the kind of people you are dealing with.
You know I'm right here, if you have an actual rebuttal and not just dismissive hand-waving.
> No-one can use social media because some people in our society can't control themselves.
I think a lot of people would be measurably better off if not for social media that algorithmically fucks with their brains.
> Socialise the losses.
I mean that's kind of the point of a society yeah? We pool our efforts to enable greater labor specialization and to achieve things no individual can. Like an electrical grid or a highway system. And when parts of those systems break down, we all contribute a little to sorting them out.
Fuck yeah let's do it.
...Good?
You're saying it as if it's a bad thing.
Limiting social media to be only used for communication, and not algorithms is a good thing.
Fun fact: Biff Tannen was modeled after Donald Trump.
Turns out the darkest timeline is also the dumbest.
https://www.nme.com/news/back-to-the-future-writer-reveals-b...
Predictably gets several things wrong.
1. Gambling is a real addiction. It is quite strange that someone using the term "Addiction Markets" fails to understand this. People who are gambling addicts were gambling before it was legal, they were just getting their legs broken in a way that was non-visible to you.
2. If you ban gambling, the ability of people to gamble online is not reduced in any way. None. The US offshore market was the biggest sports gambling market in the world before it was legalised. Not even close.
3. I would take a close look at how offshore gambling operators work before casting aspersions about onshore. Onshore, providers are working with regulators to an extremely significant degree. Offshore, sites will advertise that you can gamble on their site if you are on an onshore ban list. If onshore providers are so terrible, why is this the case?
4. The attempt to say that lotteries are addictive is just nonsense. Generally, there is a very poor understanding of what gambling addiction is (again, point 1). Certain games are designed to appeal to gambling addicts (again, the most prevalent ground for these was...the US...before online gambling was legal, biggest market by far, almost all the large companies making these games come from the US), those games are harmful. Lottery, sports gambling, raffles, DFS, etc. lack all of these properties. In particular, providers will often use virtual events (virtual horse-racing) to try to mimic the properties of more addictive products (with relatively little success)...because the original thing is not as appealing to addicts.
5. It is correct that the UK has "stake limits" (not quite sure what the author thinks this...all regulated US providers also have these, some states also have deposit acks...which would be beyond the UK standard, I would say many US states are ahead of the UK) but this is only on certain kinds of machines. The author spills a huge amount of words, talks about Trump, talks about the 1980s...but doesn't seem to talk about these machines, which are more prevalent in the US, at all. The author doesn't say anything about the issues in the UK being the same. VIP programs in the UK aren't regulated in any way different to the US (providers have no market lists). There is one important difference: in the UK, the government has given gambling providers that powers to perform extensive background checks, they take your income, an audit of your assets and then decide whether you can use their product...people opposed to gambling never mention this. How does that fit with neoliberal? A company being given the same powers as regulators?
6. There is an issue with corruption in the US. There is no coincidence that the law on online gambling changed within a few months of one of the largest donors blocking this. Both sides benefitted from this as the largest Democrat donor in those years was the Las Vegas casino workers union. Again, because this corruption meant that some kinds of gambling didn't happen...no mention. This was, we now know, hundreds of billions in value generated by paying politicians hundreds of millions a year...no mention.
7. The author appears to be unaware that DFS existed after UIGEA, not "laughable"...just a basic understanding of the sequence of events.
8. Gambling is not inherently addictive. Many things that are legal in the US are not only inherently addictive, but are inherently harmful. Liberals care about you losing your money when you buy a $5 scratch-off, they don't care about you losing your mind with mind-bending psychoactive substances.
> Gambling is a real addiction.
> Gambling is not inherently addictive.
What do you reckon makes gambling go from not inherently addictive to a real addiction?
> Liberals care about you losing your money when you buy a $5 scratch-off, they don't care about you losing your mind with mind-bending psychoactive substances.
It's hard to take anything you say seriously if you insist on being this disingenuous. You could just as easily say "Liberals care about people being financially ruined and driven into homelessness, but they don't care about you sharing a doobie on the weekend with your bros."
It's weird how we're so strict on consenting adults gambling, but when underage children gamble on Counter Strike, we as a society deem it totally fine, acceptable, and normal.
I don't get it. Somehow, them being underage makes it better and not worse??
Should be abolished, but please leave the prediction markets and just limit participation to a small number.