Maybe there could be some sort of identity based limit on how much anyone can gamble in a month?
Couldn't fully read the article though.
If betting wasn't allowed it would be significant income loss for sports teams as well. Maybe you might think that they don't need that much money, but that is subjective.
I think the core of the issue is that, much like social media addiction or nicotine pouches, the source of addiction is instantly available at any time in your pocket. There is no barrier to initiate the activity, even with smoking/vaping at least you had to go outside to get your fix.
When I was going to college I had multiple friends that would compulsively gamble whenever there was down time. They wouldn't have lost half the money they did if gambling only took place at Casinos, or at least at dedicated terminals.
I like nicotine pouches because its just plant fibre soaked/sprayed with nicotine. Its convenient like gum.
That being said I only do the 4mg option and usually after work with a beer. I dont think I'm addicted to them because I dont do them compulsively.
I know some people use nicotine to deal with anxiety or restlessness or something. I kind of like the buzz, since nicotine is a poison sourced from a plant.
How do sports teams derive income from this? Is it just in the sense of increased viewership and the possibility of sponsorships from the gambling companies? As far as I understand they do not get any money from sports gambling directly and are mostly not allowed (through internal ethics rules) to do any gambling themselves.
"Miller says the NFL doesn’t get a cut of the amount wagered with these companies. But the NFL and its television rights holders, which pay the NFL more than $13 billion a year to broadcast games, have seen a boon from advertising by the legal gaming industry." (https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/10/business/nfl-super-bowl-sport...)
So we're talking about the indirect income from advertising.
The article is poorly worded -- yes, advertisers spend a lot of money, but were those advertisers to disappear, other advertisers would buy those spots. So the question becomes, to what degree does the induced demand raise the marginal profit for advertising spots. And how that in turn affects how much networks are willing to pay the NFL for licensing, and that in turn affects how much the teams get in kickbacks from the NFL. So likely marginal at best.
The flipside is also how much viewership increases because of sports gamblers watching that would otherwise not watch. Also difficult to confidently assert the value of.
Betting companies are willing to pay far more compared to other industries since they gain the most from this sponsorship as well.
I am not from the US and NFL could probably handle it, but I am from a smaller country with smaller clubs. If betting companies sponsorship was banned many clubs, even in the top league, couldn't play on the pro or even the semi pro level.
They gain the most, but in addition they benefit from the sport being popular so they are willing to help invest in making sure that would be the case.
I live in a smaller country and all sponsors pretty much are betting companies. These sponsors by far are most lucrative compared to your usual brands exactly because of how much they make from betting. Other industries wouldn't be able to pay as much for sponsorship since due to not so large viewership they wouldn't gain all of it back.
Negatives aside if you are fine with the losses it could be viewed a bit like donating to the football clubs.
Larger football clubs could be fine taking pay cuts etc, but there would likely be many smaller clubs that can't pay their players on the pro or semi pro level any longer.
I would also suggest capping the amount that people can bet per week or month to prevent too many weak human minds from ruining their lives and worse than that ruining the lives of their wives and kids.
100/week is 5200/year. That's probably the difference between making ends meet and being always in debt for a lot of households - the median us household income is about $50k and we're talking 10% of that. That's a huge difference for the median household, and likely pretty catastrophic for the bottom quartile.
Which arguably is as much a problem with income inequality as anything else, but the point is, gambling exacerbates existing social problems.
I have participated in a few meetings of some lottery boards, and I have heard that there is a tension here between the illegal market and the pricing of the legal market. Some states charge the (relatively low) commissions that the illegal market charges because they would prefer to stamp out the illegal market, and others take your position but have a thriving black market for gambling. Those are basically the two options.
I think illegal sports gambling was less pernicious. The usual bookie offered bets on the outcome of games which are much harder to manipulate than the stupid prop bets that people get addicted to now. The stigma of being involved in something illegal also slowed things down, you had to actually call up a bookie and not just press a button on an app.
For what it's worth, I agree with you, but that's the counter-argument: if prices are too high, you're going to essentially get people either circumventing restrictions (eg with VPNs) or turning to gangs.
Some of the other games that state lotteries are adopting are almost as bad as sports betting in terms of their availability (look up instant-play gaming), but sports betting feels like a game of skill, which certainly makes it worse from a psychological perspective. I still think it should be legal if people are going to do it anyway. Maybe banning the "specials" on combo bets or requiring them to be labeled as "this is still a bad bet" could help.
For the record, I have a vested interest in sports gambling being banned because I sell products involved in instant-play and other forms of gaming that are not involved in sports betting.
Yes they did, and I don't know if we have harm data. It certainly provided a lot of funding to criminals. It probably did not cause nearly as much direct harm as we see today.
> Some states charge the (relatively low) commissions that the illegal market charges because they would prefer to stamp out the illegal market
Slight tangent, but I am now of the view the state should not be allowed to tax legal vices. (Drugs, gambling, alcohol primarily). The reason is it keeps pushing amazing conflicts of interest, and the state ends up incentivized to maintain the behavior it supposedly does not want.
Either [vice] is wrong and should be illegal, or is tolerated and regulated but in no way profited from by those that do the regulation.
Ideally you would make it extremely expensive to get started, but inexpensive if you're already addicted and beyond the point of thinking rationally about money.
That's one theory. Another Theory is that the state is simply piling on and further exploiting these people.
A third theory is that the state shouldnt be in the position of playing nanny or parent, influencing behavior. If it is illegal, prevent it from happening. If it is legal, it shouldn't it shouldnt interfere.
> A third theory is that the state shouldnt be in the position of playing nanny or parent, influencing behavior. If it is illegal, prevent it from happening. If it is legal, it shouldn't it shouldnt interfere.
This sort of black-and-white position basically means either a complete ban (presumably with a harsh penalty for people who participate in the activity) or no regulation at all. A ban will just get circumvented if you don't penalize people for getting around it, so you're going to have to penalize addicts for illegal gambling, not just the people who enable that gambling. If you want to take the other extreme, are laws that force people to put lung cancer warnings on cigarettes "playing nanny"?
In real life, we usually take middle ground positions, and that means doing things that influence behavior, whether they are taxes or restrictions on labeling.
Yes, I do think government should be more black and white, and the government should stay in it's lane. I support regulation that empowers and informs individuals to make their own choices.
Labeling of side effects, calories, and similar topics fall into that category of empowering the citizen.
Sin taxes dont educate or empower, they simply punish and try to prevent individuals from acting on their own choices.
So do you believe that any behavior should be prohibited?
Do you think sales of raw milk, which have been known to cause listeria outbreaks when people drink from an unsafe batch, should simply force labels of "this milk may be unsafe" or do you think that should be prohibited?
Do you think rhino horn should be legal to sell with the label of "this likely came from poached animals"?
Yes, lots of behavior should be prohibited. Specifically when they cause direct and indisputable harm to another person.
I think raw milk should be legal, and the labeling requirement should depend on the actual risk level, not just a vague possibility.
rhino horn is a tricky one. Poaching animals is a form of stealing, so it is clearly illegal. Off the cuff, I think selling recently harvested rhino horn should be legal but required to have evidence that it was not poached.
Raw milk should absolutely be allowed for sale if properly labeled. The risk is miniscule, and it should be up to individuals if they are ok with it or not. I myself grew up drinking raw milk every day, and nobody from my family got sick even once. It's absolutely ridiculous that it's completely banned in the US.
> A third theory is that the state shouldnt be in the position of playing nanny or parent, influencing behavior. If it is illegal, prevent it from happening. If it is legal, it shouldn't it shouldnt interfere.
A lot of things are only able to be legal because they are regulated in some way.
I absolutely want the state in the position of "playing nanny" when it comes to things like telling companies they can't dump a ton of toxic chemicals into the rivers or how much pollution they are able to spew into our air.
It's legal to sell tobacco, and it should be, but I'm very glad there are rules against selling cigarettes to children. It's legal to drink alcohol, but it's a very good thing when the state influences behavior like drunk driving.
Nobody wants arbitrary laws restricting private individuals for no reason, but communities should have the power to decide that some behaviors or actions are harmful to the group and are unacceptable. Communities have always done that in one way or another. We've just decided that rather than stick with mob justice we would put away the tar and feathers and allow the state, our public servants who are either elected by us or appointed by those we elect, to enforce the rules for us. I'm glad we did. I've already got a job and can't go around policing all day.
I dont think stopping companies from polluting rivers is playing nanny. It is against the law, destroys others property, and the government should act.
Drunk driving is illegal too, for good reasons.
Im not against laws.
What I am against is the state taking things that are explicitly legal, and making your life hard and penalizing you if you do them.
The role of the government should be enforcing law. Enforcing social judgement and incentives on legal behavior should be left to non-governmental society.
I'll admit that sin taxes imposed on the general public aren't usually a very good idea. For example, I'd much rather see government subsidizing the costs of healthy foods rather than add a tax on sugar.
I can see taxes and tariffs imposed on corporations being useful to limit the amount of certain harmful goods or to help offset the costs of externalities caused by those products. I'd still rather see companies regulated and held accountable for what they do more directly in most cases.
In my mind, the government is a heavy hammer, backed by lethal force. As such, it should be used sparingly to prevent concrete damages, enforce laws, and enforce property rights.
If a person or company is causing people real harm, that should be actionable by the government. If they are poisoning someone or killing their land, that is well within the remit.
Inversely, the government should not be a tool for optimizing society, or increasing the subjective efficiency or morality.
Government is a powerful tool, but that doesnt mean it the right tool for everything. Restraint and respecting other people's autononomy is a difficult skill to lean when you have the power to simply force compliance and "know" you are right.
How are they roughly equivalent, let alone "exactly equivalent"? It seems to me that are vast differences any way you compare them.
Economically, there are major differences in who pays them, There are differences in impact/cost. There are also huge moral differences between subsidizing desired behavior, and penalizing undesirable behavior.
Subsidies increase the amount of money in circulation and taxes decrease it. The price of goods is set relative to the amount of money in circulation (this is what inflation does). Hence, exact equivalence of taxing sugar and subsidizing foods without sugar.
No, the effect is amortized over everyone. If you elect to take $100 from half the country or give $100 to the other half it's pretty much exactly equivalent. We saw this experiment with COVID helicopter money causing inflation. You weren't seriously suggesting taxing or subsidizing only one person, were you?
Subsidizing the cost of health foods would actually be a lot more expensive. In fact, ideally it'd include increasing the accessibility of healthy foods while a tax on sugar would be much easier to implement.
It'd result in more people eating better though (instead of just eating slightly less worse, or eating worse differently while still not getting enough healthy food) and so there'd also be savings in the cost of health care and improvements in productivity.
I think the taxes thing is mainly to appease the voting public. People want the profits of the bad things to pay for the good things. It makes the ugly pill possible to swallow.
The tempting comparison is the tendency, at least in England, for things like church maintenance fundraisers to be funded by lotteries, by another name (raffle). i.e. donate money, and you might win.
Either gambling is bad or it's not, but in practice people like to be incredibly selective about it, as here, where as you point out sports betting lacks the positive externalities which for some part of the population offset the negative effects.
A church raffle only happens once a year, and the time between buying the ticket and getting the reward is relatively long. That is not going to lead to an addiction.
Having the TV blaring gambling commercials at you constantly and having the ability to place a bet from your phone at a moments notice is completely different. You’re comparing having a glass of wine on a special occasion with downing a fifth of whiskey every night.
> You’re comparing having a glass of wine on a special occasion with downing a fifth of whiskey every night
No one pretends one of those isn’t drinking though, whereas everyone pretends raffles aren’t gambling, or churches could hardly go in for it so much.
> That is not going to lead to an addiction.
So while the public described by the person I was replying to consider positive externalities sufficient to get around the “gambling bad” label for you it is all about how addictive you think an individual form of it would be for other people?
There are people that think all drink is addictive, and some people for whom this is true, but suggest banning alcohol and you are considered a crackpot.
I have known people that worked in the gambling industry and their descriptions of the addicts are mind bending. For example, they would show up at the offices and demand to gamble in person because they couldn’t find enough in life to bet on. Such people would find board games problematic, let alone a raffle situation.
> There are people that think all drink is addictive, and some people for whom this is true, but suggest banning alcohol and you are considered a crackpot.
Suggest reasonable restrictions on alcohol though and nearly everyone would agree that's a smart thing.
> I have known people that worked in the gambling industry and their descriptions of the addicts are mind bending... Such people would find board games problematic, let alone a raffle situation.
You can find equally horrific stories about alcoholics. We'd have to deal with greater numbers of "such people" if we didn't actively take steps to regulate addictive substances. Even with alcohol we have limits on where and when it can be used, and how it can be advertised. Gambling is available anywhere at anytime and ads are pushed right to addicts phones night and day to remind them to keep paying and broadcast to everyone during sporting events.
> No one pretends one of those isn’t drinking though, whereas everyone pretends raffles aren’t gambling, or churches could hardly go in for it so much.
The raffles I see have a token amount as a reward, compared to the money raised. I think that makes a big difference, both rationally and emotionally.
FYI charity raffles are actually lotteries that would be illegal if not for the charitable use of the funds and exceptions in the rules on lotteries. A lottery generally has three things:
1. A prize
2. Consideration - you must pay to enter
3. A game of pure chance - this differentiates a lottery from a tournament or a silent auction, for example
A raffle fits these definitions, but nonprofits are often allowed to run them specifically because they get an exception to the rules. That is also why many "buy my shit to win a prize" promotions have a way to enter without buying something (getting around the consideration rule) and some of these have a short math test that you need to do to claim your prize (making it a game of not pure chance).
All the big sports betting companies are now dumping money into political television commercials with school teacher testimonials and happy classroom shots urging how passing Bill X will benefit state schools, yet years into legalized sports betting, teachers still have some of the lowest compensation rates.
I mean, yes, that is a theory one could reasonably believe in. In the absence of evidence, it's not obvious at all whether it is true or false.
But this submission is about research showing that the legal market isn't just replacing the illegal market. It expands the market and the bad effects.
That is, they're able to track the deposits made to betting sites and other spending. Bets to illegal bookies are obviously not in that dataset. But if the legal gambling had replaced illegal gambling, the money going into legal gambling would appear to be coming from nowhere. Most likely a reduction in cash withdrawals? But that's not the effect they're observing. The money going into gambling is displacing other spending, including spending on +EV investments.
Given there is now evidence that the theory isn't correct, there's probably not much value in talking about it as if there really was a legitimate tradeoff here.
This is basically where I am at. I live in Illinois and it used to be you could bet at the race track or a couple Off Track Betting locations, otherwise you would have to go to a casino which was probably a distance away. Then they legalized Video Gambling and it popped up in a bunch of bars, restaurants, and stand alone places. You even see it in gas stations sometimes. Now with sports betting online there are constant advertisements for it all the time. In just 15 years legalized gambling went from something relatively niche to extremely prevalent.
There's a scene in Idiocracy where a the main character goes to a hospital and there are slot machines in the background (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70UdQJDzj4k). The last time I saw it I immediately thought of Illinois. Every time I travel to chicagoland I'm shocked to seem them everywhere. Their presence somehow makes otherwise normal places look very sad.
Tobacco bans are the way of the future, with existing smokers grandfathered out of the ban to minimize political opposition. If you're born after X date then it will never be legal for you to but it.
Opposition to bans is sort of a libertarian dogma, they say bans never work and only make the problem worse or introduce new problems, and usually cite alcohol prohibition in America. But a lot of bans do work, and even that one apparently succeeded in reducing alcohol consumption even if it did empower organized crime. What's more, it's pretty easy to ferment alcohol in your basement but it's a lot harder to hide fields of tobacco. Political dogma never captures the nuance of reality.
You seem to have the assumption that libertarian opposition to bans is based on the practicality of such and not the principle of allowing adults to make their own choices
It never ceases to amaze me how much people love to tell other people what to do even when it has absolutely nothing to do with them.
I think sports gambling is stupid and has largely ruined sports for me. Most people I know though seem to really love it, gamble completely responsibly and seem to enjoy sports they did not enjoy previously.
Unfortunately, there is no story to click on without some kind of moral outrage or "mistake" that the "smart" people need to correct. Especially appealing if it can bent into some kind of political bullshit narrative .
> they say bans never work and only make the problem worse or introduce new problems
No, that's not what we say. The primary argument for it is because we do not subscribe to a utilitarian morality. If we know that some decision leads to better outcomes from the POV of general quality of life and the like, we still wouldn't support it if it trampled individual freedoms, because we consider the latter to be more important.
It's not a difference of opinion over whether a certain theorem proves true or false. It's a matter of different set of axioms altogether.
Expensive in terms of effort, yes. There must be several opportunities for higher brain function to over-ride the reptile brain before a bet is placed.
New federal law: all gambling bets must be placed by fax or mail accompanied by a legible signature, with results to be released no less than 24 hours after betting closes.
You jest but a serious proposal on the table in Brasil right now is constant/ongoing facial recognition on online betting sites to authorise the session.
There might be someone hopelessly addicted to amateur astronomy, frequently disrupting their sleep schedule and taking out usurious loans to pay for their equipment. But, that's not happening on a scale that we need societal regulation. Gambling is a different sort of vice than many fun activities.
It's done recreationally, costs money, costs time, can cause injuries and joint problems, and is not productive. There are health benefits, but nothing that can't be had by much safer and less costly means of exercise.
Well, anything "can be viewed" in any way. That doesn't mean the view is correct or commonly used or accepted.
So criticizing the concept of vice on the grounds that "everything that's fun is a vice" is somewhat of a semantic strawman - you're criticizing the word by changing its meaning.
No it isn't. It's an opinion as to whether something is a vice. There is no theoretical model of what makes a vice; no piece of kit to measure the viceness of something. There is no morality particle to reference. It's also an opinion whether a vice is actually something negative or just a necessary aspect of the human experience.
You have a bit of a point: things that are fun are much more addictive than things that are hard or boring. And vice versa: addiction makes people believe it is fun. An addict will accept any kind of rationalization before giving up the addiction.
That doesn't mean it should be allowed. Not all fun is healthy. It's been known for over a century that gambling is detrimental, to both society and individual.
I'm not sure it would work to make it expensive, I've lived in London for a while, and tobacco products are very expensive there, they were expensive for me, I knew few Ukrainian guys I would buy cigarettes from, for 2-3 pounds a packet, while I had enough money to buy 13 pounds cigarettes after I found a better job. I know a lot of people from when I was there, they were still buying cigarettes from those Ukrainians. You make gambling expensive? I'm sure lower classes can find someone who can let them gamble for cheap. I am no libertarian, but I think when it comes to vices, it's a lost battle, prohibition works for a the better-off part of the population, it leaves the one who need government the most, outside the government reach. I'd say things should be legalised, but money shouldn't be spent for anything except help programs, social programs, better working conditions for those who suffer and find peace in gambling and/or drugs. Legalising gambling was probably a mistake, but it was a way to keep it out of reach of organised crime.
I think being born and raised in Naples, I've lived all my life in direct contact with organised crime, but many people live in places and don't make the connection, but I'd suggest everyone who think about regulating or not, to keep in mind that in any place you're in, there are 2 governments, one you can see, and one you can not
It’s already stigmatised - have you seen the quintessential meth addict/crack whores that hang around gambling/gaming joints?
There has to be a lower class. Not all but most of the people who inhabit it are just where they belong. Interventionist states with paternal social policies can’t magically raise the IQs of the dumbest 20% of their populations by 50 points, alas.
No respectable person goes to a casino except as a gag to throw away expendable income. Some labourer spending 80% of his wages at Ladbroke’s is a symptom of his stupidity, not the cause of it.
That may be true for the UK, but in America it’s very different. Most casinos are big fancy places, the local casino by me on the Indian reservation has world famous DJ’s playing pool parties, an amazing restaurant, and valet parking with supercars out front every time I have been.
Every football game has an announcer giving his lock of the week pick for DraftKings. Every stadium has a brand new fancy looking sports book attached or next door. Hell they built a draft kings attached to the local PGA course.
Most people do it all via an app, no need to even leave your couch. People openly share their bets with friends. I don’t even do sports betting, but it’s basically all over and constantly in my face.
Im in the US, grew up in Washington where its legal to gamble at 18 and absolutely its stigmatized. I gambled somewhat frequently and a big part of the appeal was to be a jerk and go mingle with people we perceived as degenerate.
Other comments mention how fancy casinos look, theyre still disgusting. Most casinos ive been to are not fancy at all. There are large "fancy" tribal casinos and the Vegas casinos but even those reek of smoke and are mostly filled with morbidly obese.
Id go as far to say people who think theres no stigma in the US have only visited Vegas or seen it on TV and dont play pai gow in Spokane bowling alleys on weeknights.
Its already expensive as it is, is it not? Like in a "people are losing heaps of money from their sour bets" kind of way.
My thought is it being more expensive is not going to stop gambling addicts since they are already willing to lose heaps of money by making the bet in the first place.
> Also it's hard to be against gambling if your state runs a lotto, which is gambling.
How so? Different kinds of gambling have different characteristics that could make them more or less prone to problematic behavior.
With the lottery, it's so boring and there's such a time lag between action and response that intuitively it seems like it would be harder to get addicted or harder for addiction to become really problematic.
State lotteries also run games like Keno, which run every 5-15 minutes. They have also started to run apps which have instant-play games, which are roughly equivalent to turning your phone into a slot machine. Keno and instant-play games still feel like chance, though, and the apps often have warnings and usage limits that the sports betting sites don't have.
>With the lottery, it's so boring and there's such a time lag between action and response that intuitively it seems like it would be harder to get addicted
Addictions don't reason. Win $10 and some people are hooked for life.
> or harder for addiction to become really problematic.
Example: a school teacher spending $200 a week on lotto tickets, not life devastating, but do we really want this in our society? This happens a lot.
Lottos just trick the people with less money into paying more taxes on the hopes of "winning it big!" It's essentially a hope tax for the lower and middle class. I can think of better ways of collecting taxes.
>> With the lottery, it's so boring and there's such a time lag between action and response that intuitively it seems like it would be harder to get addicted
> Addictions don't reason.
That argument was specifically based on how gambling feels and not reasoning.
> Lottos just trick the people with less money into paying more taxes on the hopes of "winning it big!"
How do you explain the school teacher spending $200 per week, then? The teachers here collectively own one of the world's largest hedge funds. These are very wealthy people.
It was the teachers themselves who told me, but sage advice in general. You're quite right that teaching does tend to an attract a crowd that are out to lunch.
Still, the portfolio is public knowledge, so we can also verify what they say. In this case a stopped watch is still right sometimes.
Indeed, you can't argue state lotteries aren't gambling. But hey, there is a wide spectrum of how bad each form of gambling is, and lottery is very much on the lower end of it.
Very, very few people spend $200 a week on lottery tickets -- they spend a few dollars here and there a week. (Spending $200 is just silly and barely increases the chance of winning or return -- if someone can't see that, well, can't stop them from wasting money) Of course, I would like state lotteries to be further restricted, but that's still much much better than online sports betting -- people can lose six digits of wealth quickly, and that has a much bigger and immediate impact on lives than state lotteries.
In Argentina, they recently legalized internet gambling, and now there's a 'pandemic' of teenagers facing serious problems. It's ironic to see gambling ads during football games alongside state ads promoting support for gambling addicts.
Rest is Politics Leading recently had an interview with Frank Luntz who, as well as rebranding “global warming” as “climate change”, rebranded “gambling” to “gaming”. A really eye opening interview https://open.spotify.com/episode/5sSaRKxclEFwz80cH2FwJu?si=N...
Not doubting your Mr. Luntz's influence but it turns out gaming is an old term for gambling which still causes legal nightmares for anyone in my area trying to serve alcohol at a video game themed location. Ancient laws ban gaming and alcohol to be co-located.
It has become an epidemic in Brazil. Lots and lots of people in debt because of it. Celebrities, influencers, beautiful girls... Everyone pushing for it.
I believe things would improve if we raised kids explaining them that the house always wins. It's a rigged game. Most people can't predict outcomes better than picking randomly and that way they are guaranteed to lose money because of the margins the bookies have. So if you know that you can play for fun from time to time, but not get in over your head.
But then I remember that so many are counting on the fact that people will stay uneducated so they can rip them off.
This is a good argument against lotteries but not as good an argument against sports gambling. If you are better at sports prediction than the bookmakers, you can make money. Nobody gambles as an "average person", they gamble as themselves, and convincing an individual that they personally are bad at predicting outcomes requires more than saying "most people can't do it".
People see it as a game of skill where they win money from people who are worse at that skill than they are.
You can't be better or beat the bookies because you don't play the same game. Their game is to get the money placed evenly on all outcomes so that their payout is the same no matter what happens. And people betting are in the business of predicting the future which is a fool's errand. You might think you're above average, but once you realize the game is setup so that the house always wins, you realize it's tough to get out of the hole.
It's only an addiction if it becomes one. If you prevent it, you've solved the problem before it became one, which is usually the most effective way of solving problems.
For instance, Portugal had a crisis 25 years ago with sky high number of drug related deaths, HIV infections etc. The solution was decriminalization and education, e.g. about sharing syringes. And it worked, they went from the worst I drug related deaths to best. Heroin is still bad for you and I guess people still use drugs, but at least the outcome is not catastrophic anymore.
So yes, I do think education cures a lot of problems.
Not always in the case of sports betting - although there are definitely math "taxes" like parlays and point buys and heavy chalk. Plus all the predatory "promotion" stuff they will throw out. Sharp bettors do exist though, and do make quite a bit of money. They're less than 1% though.
With all due respect, absolutely not? If a book puts out a line of +200 and you've determined there is a certain percentage chance of winning, your expectation easily can be positive. The "gambling is a tax for those bad at math" is a misconstrued quote that usually applies to completely negative expectation games, such as scratcher tickets, in which the more you play you will always lose in the long run. There are very precise mathematical terms for these things, and strictly, you are wrong.
You can extend this to things like poker as well - is that a tax on people bad at math? Of course not, that'd be a stupid argument, because it's not a purely negative expectation game.
This take, while correct, ignores the fact that chronic gambling will regularly — and predictably — destroy people's lives by virtue of its addictive qualities. Meaning, if it is legal, then we — as a society — will be negatively impacted as a whole. We all understand that a society is the sum of its people's strengths and weaknesses.
So if this is your take, then you should be perfectly willing to be heavily taxed on all of your bets so that those who can't control themselves can receive prompt and proper care to revert their addiction, and assist their families to recover from the financial ruin caused by forces outside of their control; understanding that an addiction is often uncontrollable without a lot of time and a lot of help.
If you have a problem with that, then you are signaling that you only care about society's strengths, because you are benefiting from them, and not its weaknesses, because you have not felt the gravity of a boot on your neck in awhile. Thus, I believe that your opinion is moot and also in the minority.
Gambling is also ruining professional sports for me because I find the frequent gambling promos during the games depressing and disruptive.
Many years ago I worked at a company that had Ladbrokes in the UK as a customer. On my first visit to London, I noticed their storefronts and found them appalling. They were some of the sorriest, shabbiest public spaces I'd seen, clearly designed to extract resources from the least well off.
I don't really buy any of the arguments in favor of widespread legalization (and I include state lotteries in this). I could be ok with legalization for a few big events like the NCAA tournament because clearly there is some demand that must be met, but we should not be enabling gambling as a widespread daily habit.
Of course there will always be black market gambling and the state cannot protect its citizens from every evil, but nor should it actively enable them.
Walking through the UK really does not lead to a good view of sports betting. The store fronts do not look like places that a happy person would go to.
The state of sports gambling in the UK is now such that Sky Sports (used to be a cable/satellite TV station catering purely to sports) is now basically just a series of gambling adverts with some sport thrown in to keep the punters hooked. They even launched a Sky Bet betting company which seems to have completely overtaken the TV channels - every sport is riddled with Sky Bet adverts and sponsorship. The biggest irony is that professional sportsmen (it's always men) keep getting bans for gambling on their own sport, and yet we somehow expect extremely rich young men in a "banter" culture to ignore the fact that every week they pull on a shirt with multiple gambling sponsors on it and then play in a stadium with endless gambling ads scrolling around the LED boards before being interviewed afterwards standing in front of a wall of gambling sponsors by a man with Sky Bet written on his microphone.
>The biggest irony is that professional sportsmen (it's always men) keep getting bans for gambling on their own sport
People pointing this out often leads me to an impression that athletes should be allowed to bet on their own games. Problem is, that leads to match-fixing.
My state makes lotteries illegal but I still support gambling. It’s one thing for someone to get ripped off in a private transaction that you can walk away from.
However the government is a monopoly, and has a monopoly on violence. Giving a mafia that can take your house away or put you behind bars their own casino is an incredibly bad idea.
I used to support SG legalization quite a bit, but after seeing how quickly it can get people that I once thought were rock solid financially into a very bad financial situation quicker than I thought possible, I have no problem with heavily regulating bets sizes and interaction limits, if not an outright ban. Before it was slightly illegal and those people I guess avoided “bookies” as a result of being afraid of that whole scene. The most I ever gamble is when the lotteries get to ridiculously high amounts like $500 million and get a $2 ticket. However, people seem to get addicted to sports betting as fast as crack cocaine and it’s much wider spread than I thought, and contributes almost nothing to civilization other than the pocket books of the middle men. Is it because sports betting gives you quick feedback as oppose to lotteries making you wait or maybe the ease it is to drop your whole bank account as a bet? It seems like net societal negative in almost all ways other than a brief chance of thrill.
> Is it because sports betting gives you quick feedback as oppose to lotteries making you wait or maybe the ease it is to drop your whole bank account as a bet?
I suspect it's because unlike the lotto and games of chance, people can delude themselves into thinking they "know" the sport. It's not a gambling if they know better. It's also easy to externalize the blame for your loses "they would have won if not for <bad call, bad play, bad management, injury, weather, etc... Or combination thereof>"
You can dip your toe in betting on the obvious mismatched, where it's pretty clear who will win. This is priced into the bookmaking, so the payout is little, but this helps people convince themselves they do know the sport and chase longer odds with better payouts.
And then you get sunk cost fallacy, as they lose, they convince themselves they can win it back because they learned from before and their system will work this time.
I also don't think people realize how much money, effort, time, very smart (and well-funded) individuals are working on making those odds. They have access to decades worth of data, all the stats, and are entirely un-emotional or clinical about the data they are trawling through. Even if they miss something or get it wrong, it's usually minute and you as the gambler barely make any money out of it. Short of some black-swan like event or insider knowledge, you as a single individual would not be able to come up with a system that on average does better than the book makers.
At least (very loosely) with the lottery it's kinda random and your odds are "set" or rather your payout is not proportionate to your chance of winning. It's a happy surprise kind of thing as long as you don't overdo it.
It's not just the bookmakers either - there are syndicates, much like hedge funds, whose entire 9-5 job is trying to make money out of this stuff too, which forces the bookies into line and makes the prices on markets like Betfair fairly efficient.
Basically, as a guy on the street, you don't have a clue and you're up against MIT-tier brains trying to beat you.
It's interesting to me that more people don't realise this is intuitively obvious, though. No-one would look at the Olympics and think, oh yeah, I can run faster than Usain Bolt.
You don't need to beat the bookies, you need to beat the odds. The bookies win either way. All they need to do is make sure bets on each side net out, minus their take.
If you have a reliable way to beat the odds (ie. Inefficient betting markets that get the odds of success wrong) you can theoretically make money - but its a similar scenario to daytrading, where you need to do extremely well because you have to overcome the negative drag from the booky take too.
That's a good point about being easy to externalize the blame. I'd also add on that likely a reason is the emotion of it. People are already emotional about sports and their team. With money on the line, that ramps up even more. The emotional aspect with highs and lows helps people crave more of that excitement.
> because clearly there is some demand that must be met
There is demand it's not clear that it "must be met." The problem is not the betting or oddsmaking, the problem is, how do you handle settlements?
You're presenting the false dichotomy, that we should just allow gambling, because it's inevitable, and we can occasionally use the violence of the state and it's courts to run the settlement racket on behalf of short changed bookies.
> but we should not be enabling gambling
And we have no reason to. We should harshly penalize people who try to collect on gambling debt and they should have no access to the courts or to sheriff's over problems arising from it.
> cannot protect its citizens from every evil
That's why this is all so insidious because it's really only one you need to actually protect them from. Suddenly you'll find the industry self regulating customers with an obvious illness out at the front door. They'll get amazingly good at this.
Not sure about total death rates but I think gambling addiction has the highest suicide rate of any of the big addictions out there. It seems truly ruinous. I suppose if any random person can blow their savings on out of the money options theyre unable to gauge the risk of then they might as well be allowed to do the same with crazy parlay bets but seeing the whole landscape of sports betting evolve over the last handful of years has still been quite eerie to me.
My gut these days tells me its probably better for the humans in society if this stuff is left only to black markets because it seems like it destroys lives.
While we don't have Ladbrokes, we do have a number of different companies running gambling halls, with slot machines and sports gambling. Those should be outlawed, there is nothing good about them, they provide absolutely no value to society. I'm fine with people being able to place a small bet on their local football team and I'm fine with casinos where people make it an occasional event, similar to going to the movies or seeing a concert.
But these commercial gambling halls, it's not some well of person who decides to pop in Friday afternoon and maybe lose €20 on a crazy sports bet or the slot machines and then go home and have dinner with the family. It is the some of our weakest and loneliest people who line up, waiting for the place to open and then spend the next 10 hours there. There are places who will provide free food for their best "customers", to ensure that they don't leave. We're transferring money from social welfare to private companies, using addiction and loneliness.
As for sports, I don't think professional soccer would like a ban on sports gambling. The revenue and salaries it have generated are to high for them to walk away now. It is hurting the sport though, in the sense that the community and local fans have been pushed out long ago. A local football club had to leave the premier league a few years ago, as a result they could no longer charge insane prices for tickets at the stadium. The result: They had more fans come to every single game, they sold more season passes, because the fans still wanted to see the games, and now they could afford it. Sure, they made less money, but the connection to the fans and the city grow.
This is a very thoughtful post. I have witnessed similar gambling establishments in Japan/JRA and Hong Kong/HJC. Both are equally unappealing to me for various reasons that you mentioned.
Your post made me think more about sports betting vs a lottery. To me, they really are different. With a lottery, you need to wait days to get the result (mostly). The chance for multiple quick dopamine hits is exceedingly low. (Scratch tickets and high speed lottos are another matter.). Now think about sports betting: So many simultaneous events or races, so the customer (user?) has many more chances for multiple quick dopamine hits. Maybe a potential framework to talk about gambling harm is opportunities for for multiple quick dopamine hits. If very low, then many tolerate it in their community, especially if a significant portion goes to social causes.
One thing I am absolutely sure about: Advertising for sports betting should be banned. I put it in the same class as cigarette ads as a child. Damn they looked so cool and fun. What a terrible message to spread!
Sports gambling should be regulated like we do day trading (basically another form of gambling) — require a some minimum threshold of money in the account to deter those without disposable income from gambling away their savings (for day trading it’s $25k).
Is it? The role of government is to clean up individuals who cause trouble for the population at large.
Poor people who trade their grocery budget for gambling undeniably cause trouble for a population. Do rich people who trade their luxury handbag budget for gambling equally cause trouble for a population?
I think it's reasonable to carryover retail investor protections to the gambling world. One market has much more history in taking advantage of the average Joe and as a result there are many sensible protections in place. If you can't withstand losing your entire investment, you probably shouldn't be able to place that bet in the first place.
Unfortunately, since gambling is only recently more accessible/prevalent, I think it's going to take a few mishaps to produce similar regulations.
> pattern day traders must maintain minimum equity of $25,000 in their margin account on any day that the customer day trades
> pattern day traders cannot trade in excess of their "day-trading buying power"
> If a pattern day trader exceeds the day-trading buying power limitation, a firm will issue a day-trading margin call, after which the pattern day trader will then have, at most, five business days to deposit funds to meet the call.
> Day trading, as defined by FINRA’s margin rule, refers to a trading strategy where an individual buys and sells (or sells and buys) the same security in a margin account on the same day in an attempt to profit from small movements in the price of the security.
(emphasis original)
There are no restrictions on trading with your own money, whether you can afford it or not.
I think a lot of the recent trading apps marketed to consumers give you a margin account by default though, I know Robinhood does. If you request a cash account you lose instant deposits and trading and have to wait for everything to clear normally.
The way trade settling works means that if you buy/sell the same security in the same day it will, by definition, be on margin. Even if you have cash balances backing that trade.
I don't think so, investors have the capital in order to afford to deal with regulations. Over regulating and making it expensive/hard to gamble legally, would just send people over to organised crime. I'd be happy if we forced gambling companies to hire addiction-psychologists in each of their shops for people to talk to, for one we could shrink the amout of gambling shops, as they wouldn't open one every 10 meters, and we would bring help directly to those who need it on the spot
I'm of the opinion that gambling as a whole should not be regulated.The only restriction should be on using other people's money instead of your own.
It makes no sense, it is the person's money and life, and it is theirs to ruin as they wish. We are not properties of the state. If a person cannot be allowed to do what they wish with their own money, because they might harm themselves or others as a result, then how can you trust them with driving a vehicle, flying a plane, operating weapons in the military, or even owning a personal weapon?
Every gun sold to a person is a gamble on whether they use it to cause harm on others (same with the things i listed above).
This same logic applies to regulation of drugs in general as well in my opinion. Regulating other peoples lives is not the purpose of the government, especially when they're not harming others or being a nuisance to the public.
> how can you trust them with driving a vehicle, flying a plane, operating weapons in the military, or even owning a personal weapon?
Comparing Oranges to Potatoes. People involved in gambling are not stupid. They are either 1. Not quite smart or mathematically smart, so they don't understand the odds or 2. Addicted to gambling in the same way someone is addicted to Tobacco. Of course, there is 3. Having a little fun with a little money; but this is not the audience that's making money for gaming.
> Addicted to gambling in the same way someone is addicted to Tobacco
Addicted people are still responsible for their actions. case in point: drunken driving. I agree with punishing gamblers that cause harm. but gambling itself should not be regulated. Tobacco, alcohol, hard drugs,etc.. they should all be allowed. But to balance that, punishment for crime needs to be severe when you're an addict.
That's not right, many gamblers don't even have a family. Are you saying people's lives should be regulated so that they don't spend their money in ways that their family wouldn't want it spent? I mean, last I checked, divorce, emancipation is still allowed.
How can we regulate what a person does with their hard earned wages from their labor and precious time and then still claim that person has liberties of any kind? If you think about it, this is the one and only fundamental liberty that is foundational to all other liberties.
Even slaves get food and shelter as well as some freedom of movement and expression. What they don't get is to be able to buy what they want and own it.
> vehicle, flying a plane, operating weapons in the military, or even owning a personal weapon?
3 of these require significant training or at least licensing and the last one is banned in the majority of western nations.
I'm with you that personal responsibility and freedom should be the norm, but active predators (Drug dealers, bookies, social media companies) should probably have limits put on what they're allowed to do.
I'm not against requiring training on math and statistics for gamblers.
For your last statement, I agree, "active predators" should be restricted or punished because their intent is to cause harm at the cost of others for profit. but if they're just selling the "drug", why should that be restricted? You can force them to inform their customers of the harm,but that's about it.
No, but gamblers are allowed to do all those things. and I am not against requiring a license for gambling either, so long as the barrier for entry is reasonable.
Oh ok, I thought you were saying it shouldn't be regulated at all.
So like,what about making gambling work like credit cards: you get a license that allocates a monthly cap based on a combination of credit score and income. It starts very low and scales up to, I don't know, 10% of income?
I wouldn't like that either. Instead, maybe issue licenses to gamblers and like with a credit score, the fact that you have a gamblers license can affect things like getting loans, renting things, what you can buy,etc.. Let others who suffer an increased risk based on interacting with you refuse to do so, or incur additional penalties. Your monthly cap idea still nannies citizens.
We should be free to ruin ourselves if we so wish, but if we are set on a track like that, others should be made aware so they can react as they wish.
Same with drugs, if you get a drug use license, then employers can deny you jobs, you may not be allowed to drive, be trusted with loans,etc..
You get rights, but they come with responsibilities and restrictions.
Too bad, that still doesn't give you authority over other people, before they do something harmful to you. You can policy sports corruption and crime, regulate bankruptcy more,etc.. but you don't have the right to police people as a whole "just in case". I did not suggest allowing gambling to be used as an excuse to cause harm. You prevent crime by punishing it. You reduce bankruptcy by adding costs to it. (no comment on sports, since I don't think it is a net positive in society to begin with).
punish the nuisance then, so long as actual harm is involved instead of simple visual displeasure. not the perceived cause. Stay out of people's lives. Society is also a nuisance to drug users and gamblers. The foundation of liberty is the protection of rights for even the most disagreeable individuals.
You don't deserve any rights or liberties if you can't accept the rights of the drug addicts,gamblers, homeless people and many more types of people out there.
It is a fundamental aspect of the human experience to self-determine one's fate.
libertarians are so incredibly cringe its unbelievable. rights don't exist. they are not a law of nature. rights are a human invented concept. rights are both created by and enforced by government. generally speaking we do try to opt for giving people as much freedom as possible, that said if certain things have a high probability of negative externalties the government both can and does make those things illegal.
This isn't about libertarianism at all. it's about justice.
It is unfair and unjust to punish someone based on probabilities. A innocent person should not be treated like a criminal. A free person shouldn't be treated like a prisoner or a slave.
The government has no authority to punish citizens because they might commit a crime. Citizens are subject to the rule of law. But in exchange for compliance to the laws, we expect a fair and just treatment under that law. That is the contract.
>The government has no authority to punish citizens because they might commit a crime
you are either being hyperbolic, you are irrationally ideological, or you haven't thought about this enough.
surely you don't think that people should be allowed to have nuclear explosives in their house because until they have actually used them they haven't actually committed a crime yet. different people can have different ideas on where that line is but you must acknowledge that it exists.
A nuke or a weapon of any kind except knives have one use, which is to harm people, they're built explicitly for that purpose, which is to harm others, so regulating their ownership and use is not a good analogy.
Maybe cars are sane analogy. You need to pass all kinds of testing and regulation to be allowed to drive a car or build and operate your own car, but only on public roads. You can in fact buy any kind of car you want or build one and operate it as you wish on your own property without any license. Even though cars can be used as dangerous and deadly weapons (terrorists use them on crowds all the time).
Yes, a line exists, that line is when you are engaging in privileged activity like driving, flying on a commercial plane or train, entering school property and such.
Maybe it might be productive if you used specific scenarios where you think allowing gambling would cause harm to others in and of itself, not as a side-effect (your nuke example is a direct effect).
maybe it would make more sense if i framed my perspective differently. i think as a default laws should offer as much agency as possible to the individual. if someone wants to smoke cigarettes even though it literally does nothing but kill them, i'm fine with that. i think that there is a threshold that can be passed whereby *on average* it starts creating serious externalities on society. if the externalities get too high i'm fine with them stepping in and making regulations restricting and potentially banning them. there are plenty of weapons and chemicals and materials that fall into this area. i think that when it comes to stuff like drugs and gambling if you do a blanket ban on them it might actually make the problem worse because it creates a black market and demand will just go there. this will be make it impossible to regulate and impossible to even know what is happening in these markets. i would suspect that a better answer is to have specific types of gambling and a form of drugs that are legal that is hopefully less damaging that people with propensity for this sort of thing could be funneled into.
I think you have a very good point, and I agree to the most part.
My overarching objection is that such laws are simply lazy. That laziness is infringing on people's liberties. Cigarettes are a good example, they shouldn't be outright banned as we both agree, but second-hand smoking should be banned as it affects others. I would even go as far as to say smokers should have higher premiums for the rest of their lives (I was one myself) when it comes to health insurance and such deliberate mishandling of your body might even cost you priority treatment for anything subsidized by the public. I am not against consequences at all.
I think like many legal issues, it boils down to what is "reasonable". If a "reasonable" person would find that possessing a nuke is an immediate danger to the public then of course possessing one doesn't amount to the government interfering in private lives. That is not the same as gambling and drug use, where the reason for restricting them is not an immediate concern of danger but an indirect and probabilistic anticipation of harm to others, which even if true, there are many other steps that can be taken to disincentivize or punish potential harmful interactions without outright restricting those things.
For example with drug use, it should only be allowed under medical supervision, when used outside of your own property. And as I stated earlier, gambling is bad financial decision making, so the fact that you are gambling and the details of your gambles should be made very public, so that others can steer clear of you as needed. It shouldn't be possible for a person to use a joint bank account to fund a gamble (to protect spouses and families), spouses should get notifications when their other half is gambling,etc.. That's hard and specific law making, instead of the lazy and unjust law making we have today.
I think this is a misapprehension -- there is a ton of regulation around sports gambling. They may not have put the specific regulation that you think is necessary (in this case, banning advertising) but there are pretty huge barriers to entry to get into the sports bookmaking business, including a number of background checks and interviews in an attempt to prevent organized crime from getting a foothold. This is why every time you see an add for gambling there's a note on the ad saying "if you have a problem with gambling call this help line".
Yes. Lotteries always seemed like the thin side of a wedge that made other gambling seem less bad. It's also kind of evil for a government to prey on its own citizens' innumeracy.
if you accept that people are going to gamble no matter what the government does, a state run lottery may not be considered predatory if it siphons money off of organized crime numbers games.
the predatory part is the siphoning money off from the lottery to pay for "shools,etc." but if there is inelastic demand for lottery gambling, that also makes rational sense.
There were tons of red flags that were completely set aside.
The largest are probably mobile betting and allowing for instant credit card deposits.
There is also the fantasy of being able to win money but the reality that if you actually win money in a consistent fashion, you will be either kicked-off or your action will be severely crippled.
I'd like to think the emerging prediction markets, like Polymarket, are much fairer systems, especially for winning players, and would be much better than sports books like DraftKings, FanDuel, etc.
Polymarket works on mobile and allows instant USDC deposits. Are these somehow red flags elsewhere, but not here?
Not to mention the Pandora's box that prediction markets open, when the order book can begin to influence real life events - from match fixing, to assassination markets.
It's not like that box has been firmly closed until now. Every time someone stands to profit from one outcome over another they already have an incentive to influence the outcome, prediction market existing or not. And stock markets already act as a sort of prediction basket about future events that will influence the trajectory of a company (e.g. the outcome of trade negotiations, wars, court decisions, elections, the health of their CEO etc. etc.)
The upside of prediction markets is that it incentives people with information to make their honest estimates legible to society. E.g. an opinion piece in a newspaper has little skin in the game, other than the author's reputation.
> There is also the fantasy of being able to win money but the reality that if you actually win money in a consistent fashion, you will be either kicked-off or your action will be severely crippled.
This does not apply to all bookmakers. Also, betting exchanges exist where the players bet against each other therefore there is no incentive for the operator to ban winning players.
Reshape the entire industry to be a decentralized/house-edge-free form, where any one player has a net 0% gain/loss outcome over time. Regulate what bets can be placed and their payouts so that winners win less amounts and losers lose less amounts (i.e. you don't get wiped out).
It will feel like gambling, but overtime is no different than coin flipping for lunch money with a coworker every day. Essentially math away the "house always wins" part.
One way to look at this is it is already sort of the dividing line between traditional "Fantasy Sports" and modern "Sports Betting". Fantasy Sports involves finding a like-minded group and winnings are often as much "bragging rights" and camaraderie as it might be any actual pool of money. Sports Betting is certainly not that.
A problem is infection. As Sports Betting is more legal and profitable, Fantasy Sports gain more Sports Bets and pseudoanonymity and lose some of their community spirit for "micro-transactions" and other "extreme gamification" and the line between each blurs. (Including to the point where groups looking for one might be easily confused into doing the other.)
I idly wonder if there is a way to shore up Fantasy Sports against the tide of Sports Betting profit.
There are such attempts, e.g. Smarkets. The general approach is called a "betting exchange" where you buy and sell bets with other people to set the market price for the various games / events going on. It's too complicated, though. Most people just want to bet on the Pats winning. They're not rational financial actors.
great but who is funding that at %0? is it non profit? like website, company and math people there will have wages. so even 1% is impossible without incredibly big volume and liqudity.
I don't understand why there couldn't have been a middle ground where we legalized it but restricted the advertising so that it wouldn't be shoved down our throats so aggressively at all times whiched has ruined sports altogether.
I don't want to stop those who enjoy it from enjoying it for the sake of those whose decision making doesn't interact well with its legalisation. I think others care more about preventing people from acting in ways that have negative consequences than I do, so I don't expect many to agree with me.
I think the majority of people who are against these changes, like you, don’t want to ban people from gambling. The situation before was that bets between individuals on sports events was totally legal, but no businesses were allowed to profit from it.
It’s not that casual bets between friends should be banned, but this insidious industry that spends 100s of millions on marketing, and uses every tactic available to lure people and then get them addicted. That is such a far cry from not wanting people to gamble at all. Those who want to be a nanny and say boo hoo gambling bad are in a totally different category to the people who reasonably think that there’s a serious issue with this industry.
I think you are right that most people who want to ban such activities want to go back to the former situation where people could only bet on sports with friends. Their position is different to mine.
By exposing complete and utter ignorance about the neurobiological mechanisms behind motivation and addiction, you've evinced a "stupid" opinion.
When, in your own time, your ignorance leads you to make "stupid" decisions, I hope there's a safety net in place to protect you and people who depend on you. I also hope there's a support network to help people you mislead with your idiotic parenting, should you breed, which at the moment I hope you choose to defer.
In the meantime enjoy congratulating yourself for accomplishments you almost certainly didn't earn purely in virtue of your perceived "intellectual superiority" while denigrating others for mistakes we could have helped them avoid.
Your lack of compassion does not withstand rational scrutiny. I sincerely hope that as you gain experience in the world you continue to reflect on your relationship with other human beings, and that in your own way you develop a deeper and less idiotic understanding of others.
"You can't fix stupid" doesn't entail that you shouldn't regulate activities with potentially catastrophic consequences for families. It entails the opposite.
We can, and should mitigate the harm to individuals and families that stems from said "stupidity" through... precisely... regulation.
Go to a GA meeting some time. People who develop crippling gambling addictions are exposed to gambling precisely through going to a casino "as a gag to throw away expendable income," the same way most alcoholics are exposed to alcohol through casual, healthy drinking. No one walks into a casino thinking "let's throw my life and the financial security of my family away," and the proclivity for such is not readily predictable with any meaningful precision at present.
The inference to draw from this is that we should reduce harm through regulation, not double down on the damage we're causing and writing off the resulting, predictable damage as immaterial because the "people were stupid."
Like... what is your actual goal? Increasing human misery? Creating a society in which people predictably suffer from the predictable, catastrophic consequences of unregulated enterprise?
(This isn't even touching the blanket categorization of everyone who develops a crippling addiction as "stupid," which doesn't withstand even superficial scrutiny. What's the point of that blanket demonization?)
The medicalization of the underlying problem should push you towards an epidemiological perspective on the problem, not a thin, incoherent moralizing knee-jerk.
Like... "you can't fix stupid" - sure, my grandmother was scammed while declining into (heretofore undiagnosed) dementia. Is the inference to draw "she's stupid, let's permit unfettered exploitation of people?" No, it's let's keep financial fraud illegal, prosecute the scammers, take some steps to help grandma prevent a repeat, and behave like sane, compassionate individuals.
You and I will never agree on this. I do not share your empathy, either in its scope or its depth. It’s that simple. You think it’s the State’s job to protect certain people, whereas I would prefer that those people didn’t exist. While I wouldn’t necessarily promulgate any State proactively getting rid of its dumbest citizens (such as what the Nazis tried doing with Aktion T4), I do think the state should in many cases stay fully hands off and let natural selection do its thing. There’s no real debate to be had about that because neither of us are going to compromise on our views.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 312 ms ] threadCouldn't fully read the article though.
If betting wasn't allowed it would be significant income loss for sports teams as well. Maybe you might think that they don't need that much money, but that is subjective.
When I was going to college I had multiple friends that would compulsively gamble whenever there was down time. They wouldn't have lost half the money they did if gambling only took place at Casinos, or at least at dedicated terminals.
That being said I only do the 4mg option and usually after work with a beer. I dont think I'm addicted to them because I dont do them compulsively.
I know some people use nicotine to deal with anxiety or restlessness or something. I kind of like the buzz, since nicotine is a poison sourced from a plant.
Sorry tangential rant lol
The article is poorly worded -- yes, advertisers spend a lot of money, but were those advertisers to disappear, other advertisers would buy those spots. So the question becomes, to what degree does the induced demand raise the marginal profit for advertising spots. And how that in turn affects how much networks are willing to pay the NFL for licensing, and that in turn affects how much the teams get in kickbacks from the NFL. So likely marginal at best.
The flipside is also how much viewership increases because of sports gamblers watching that would otherwise not watch. Also difficult to confidently assert the value of.
I am not from the US and NFL could probably handle it, but I am from a smaller country with smaller clubs. If betting companies sponsorship was banned many clubs, even in the top league, couldn't play on the pro or even the semi pro level.
They gain the most, but in addition they benefit from the sport being popular so they are willing to help invest in making sure that would be the case.
Negatives aside if you are fine with the losses it could be viewed a bit like donating to the football clubs.
Larger football clubs could be fine taking pay cuts etc, but there would likely be many smaller clubs that can't pay their players on the pro or semi pro level any longer.
At the very least, ads should be banned or require nasty images like tobacco products.
let's means test the rich for once
Which arguably is as much a problem with income inequality as anything else, but the point is, gambling exacerbates existing social problems.
Some of the other games that state lotteries are adopting are almost as bad as sports betting in terms of their availability (look up instant-play gaming), but sports betting feels like a game of skill, which certainly makes it worse from a psychological perspective. I still think it should be legal if people are going to do it anyway. Maybe banning the "specials" on combo bets or requiring them to be labeled as "this is still a bad bet" could help.
For the record, I have a vested interest in sports gambling being banned because I sell products involved in instant-play and other forms of gaming that are not involved in sports betting.
Slight tangent, but I am now of the view the state should not be allowed to tax legal vices. (Drugs, gambling, alcohol primarily). The reason is it keeps pushing amazing conflicts of interest, and the state ends up incentivized to maintain the behavior it supposedly does not want.
Either [vice] is wrong and should be illegal, or is tolerated and regulated but in no way profited from by those that do the regulation.
A third theory is that the state shouldnt be in the position of playing nanny or parent, influencing behavior. If it is illegal, prevent it from happening. If it is legal, it shouldn't it shouldnt interfere.
This sort of black-and-white position basically means either a complete ban (presumably with a harsh penalty for people who participate in the activity) or no regulation at all. A ban will just get circumvented if you don't penalize people for getting around it, so you're going to have to penalize addicts for illegal gambling, not just the people who enable that gambling. If you want to take the other extreme, are laws that force people to put lung cancer warnings on cigarettes "playing nanny"?
In real life, we usually take middle ground positions, and that means doing things that influence behavior, whether they are taxes or restrictions on labeling.
Labeling of side effects, calories, and similar topics fall into that category of empowering the citizen.
Sin taxes dont educate or empower, they simply punish and try to prevent individuals from acting on their own choices.
The two are very different.
Do you think sales of raw milk, which have been known to cause listeria outbreaks when people drink from an unsafe batch, should simply force labels of "this milk may be unsafe" or do you think that should be prohibited?
Do you think rhino horn should be legal to sell with the label of "this likely came from poached animals"?
I think raw milk should be legal, and the labeling requirement should depend on the actual risk level, not just a vague possibility.
rhino horn is a tricky one. Poaching animals is a form of stealing, so it is clearly illegal. Off the cuff, I think selling recently harvested rhino horn should be legal but required to have evidence that it was not poached.
Do you think think states should be able to ban the sale of meat or specific types of farmed meat?
A lot of things are only able to be legal because they are regulated in some way. I absolutely want the state in the position of "playing nanny" when it comes to things like telling companies they can't dump a ton of toxic chemicals into the rivers or how much pollution they are able to spew into our air.
It's legal to sell tobacco, and it should be, but I'm very glad there are rules against selling cigarettes to children. It's legal to drink alcohol, but it's a very good thing when the state influences behavior like drunk driving.
Nobody wants arbitrary laws restricting private individuals for no reason, but communities should have the power to decide that some behaviors or actions are harmful to the group and are unacceptable. Communities have always done that in one way or another. We've just decided that rather than stick with mob justice we would put away the tar and feathers and allow the state, our public servants who are either elected by us or appointed by those we elect, to enforce the rules for us. I'm glad we did. I've already got a job and can't go around policing all day.
Drunk driving is illegal too, for good reasons.
Im not against laws.
What I am against is the state taking things that are explicitly legal, and making your life hard and penalizing you if you do them.
The role of the government should be enforcing law. Enforcing social judgement and incentives on legal behavior should be left to non-governmental society.
Sin taxes are a classic example of this.
I can see taxes and tariffs imposed on corporations being useful to limit the amount of certain harmful goods or to help offset the costs of externalities caused by those products. I'd still rather see companies regulated and held accountable for what they do more directly in most cases.
In my mind, the government is a heavy hammer, backed by lethal force. As such, it should be used sparingly to prevent concrete damages, enforce laws, and enforce property rights.
If a person or company is causing people real harm, that should be actionable by the government. If they are poisoning someone or killing their land, that is well within the remit.
Inversely, the government should not be a tool for optimizing society, or increasing the subjective efficiency or morality.
Government is a powerful tool, but that doesnt mean it the right tool for everything. Restraint and respecting other people's autononomy is a difficult skill to lean when you have the power to simply force compliance and "know" you are right.
Economically, there are major differences in who pays them, There are differences in impact/cost. There are also huge moral differences between subsidizing desired behavior, and penalizing undesirable behavior.
Taxes and benefits are extremely unequal in their application.
It'd result in more people eating better though (instead of just eating slightly less worse, or eating worse differently while still not getting enough healthy food) and so there'd also be savings in the cost of health care and improvements in productivity.
Either gambling is bad or it's not, but in practice people like to be incredibly selective about it, as here, where as you point out sports betting lacks the positive externalities which for some part of the population offset the negative effects.
Having the TV blaring gambling commercials at you constantly and having the ability to place a bet from your phone at a moments notice is completely different. You’re comparing having a glass of wine on a special occasion with downing a fifth of whiskey every night.
No one pretends one of those isn’t drinking though, whereas everyone pretends raffles aren’t gambling, or churches could hardly go in for it so much.
> That is not going to lead to an addiction.
So while the public described by the person I was replying to consider positive externalities sufficient to get around the “gambling bad” label for you it is all about how addictive you think an individual form of it would be for other people?
There are people that think all drink is addictive, and some people for whom this is true, but suggest banning alcohol and you are considered a crackpot.
I have known people that worked in the gambling industry and their descriptions of the addicts are mind bending. For example, they would show up at the offices and demand to gamble in person because they couldn’t find enough in life to bet on. Such people would find board games problematic, let alone a raffle situation.
Suggest reasonable restrictions on alcohol though and nearly everyone would agree that's a smart thing.
> I have known people that worked in the gambling industry and their descriptions of the addicts are mind bending... Such people would find board games problematic, let alone a raffle situation.
You can find equally horrific stories about alcoholics. We'd have to deal with greater numbers of "such people" if we didn't actively take steps to regulate addictive substances. Even with alcohol we have limits on where and when it can be used, and how it can be advertised. Gambling is available anywhere at anytime and ads are pushed right to addicts phones night and day to remind them to keep paying and broadcast to everyone during sporting events.
The raffles I see have a token amount as a reward, compared to the money raised. I think that makes a big difference, both rationally and emotionally.
And? Should we legislate based on some peoples' belief that the rapture is imminent?
1. A prize
2. Consideration - you must pay to enter
3. A game of pure chance - this differentiates a lottery from a tournament or a silent auction, for example
A raffle fits these definitions, but nonprofits are often allowed to run them specifically because they get an exception to the rules. That is also why many "buy my shit to win a prize" promotions have a way to enter without buying something (getting around the consideration rule) and some of these have a short math test that you need to do to claim your prize (making it a game of not pure chance).
But this submission is about research showing that the legal market isn't just replacing the illegal market. It expands the market and the bad effects.
That is, they're able to track the deposits made to betting sites and other spending. Bets to illegal bookies are obviously not in that dataset. But if the legal gambling had replaced illegal gambling, the money going into legal gambling would appear to be coming from nowhere. Most likely a reduction in cash withdrawals? But that's not the effect they're observing. The money going into gambling is displacing other spending, including spending on +EV investments.
Given there is now evidence that the theory isn't correct, there's probably not much value in talking about it as if there really was a legitimate tradeoff here.
I think it's cruel for us as a society to allow that to be exploited for financial gain.
Bonus for phrases on them like "Play while you wait" and "Win free medical care"
Opposition to bans is sort of a libertarian dogma, they say bans never work and only make the problem worse or introduce new problems, and usually cite alcohol prohibition in America. But a lot of bans do work, and even that one apparently succeeded in reducing alcohol consumption even if it did empower organized crime. What's more, it's pretty easy to ferment alcohol in your basement but it's a lot harder to hide fields of tobacco. Political dogma never captures the nuance of reality.
I think sports gambling is stupid and has largely ruined sports for me. Most people I know though seem to really love it, gamble completely responsibly and seem to enjoy sports they did not enjoy previously.
Unfortunately, there is no story to click on without some kind of moral outrage or "mistake" that the "smart" people need to correct. Especially appealing if it can bent into some kind of political bullshit narrative .
No, that's not what we say. The primary argument for it is because we do not subscribe to a utilitarian morality. If we know that some decision leads to better outcomes from the POV of general quality of life and the like, we still wouldn't support it if it trampled individual freedoms, because we consider the latter to be more important.
It's not a difference of opinion over whether a certain theorem proves true or false. It's a matter of different set of axioms altogether.
It's done recreationally, costs money, costs time, can cause injuries and joint problems, and is not productive. There are health benefits, but nothing that can't be had by much safer and less costly means of exercise.
So criticizing the concept of vice on the grounds that "everything that's fun is a vice" is somewhat of a semantic strawman - you're criticizing the word by changing its meaning.
That doesn't mean it should be allowed. Not all fun is healthy. It's been known for over a century that gambling is detrimental, to both society and individual.
I think being born and raised in Naples, I've lived all my life in direct contact with organised crime, but many people live in places and don't make the connection, but I'd suggest everyone who think about regulating or not, to keep in mind that in any place you're in, there are 2 governments, one you can see, and one you can not
There has to be a lower class. Not all but most of the people who inhabit it are just where they belong. Interventionist states with paternal social policies can’t magically raise the IQs of the dumbest 20% of their populations by 50 points, alas.
No respectable person goes to a casino except as a gag to throw away expendable income. Some labourer spending 80% of his wages at Ladbroke’s is a symptom of his stupidity, not the cause of it.
The sheer amount of advertising for gambling and revenue growth for these companies indicates there is little stigma.
Every football game has an announcer giving his lock of the week pick for DraftKings. Every stadium has a brand new fancy looking sports book attached or next door. Hell they built a draft kings attached to the local PGA course.
Most people do it all via an app, no need to even leave your couch. People openly share their bets with friends. I don’t even do sports betting, but it’s basically all over and constantly in my face.
Other comments mention how fancy casinos look, theyre still disgusting. Most casinos ive been to are not fancy at all. There are large "fancy" tribal casinos and the Vegas casinos but even those reek of smoke and are mostly filled with morbidly obese.
Id go as far to say people who think theres no stigma in the US have only visited Vegas or seen it on TV and dont play pai gow in Spokane bowling alleys on weeknights.
My thought is it being more expensive is not going to stop gambling addicts since they are already willing to lose heaps of money by making the bet in the first place.
I agree about banning ads 100%.
How so? Different kinds of gambling have different characteristics that could make them more or less prone to problematic behavior.
With the lottery, it's so boring and there's such a time lag between action and response that intuitively it seems like it would be harder to get addicted or harder for addiction to become really problematic.
Addictions don't reason. Win $10 and some people are hooked for life.
> or harder for addiction to become really problematic.
Example: a school teacher spending $200 a week on lotto tickets, not life devastating, but do we really want this in our society? This happens a lot.
Lottos just trick the people with less money into paying more taxes on the hopes of "winning it big!" It's essentially a hope tax for the lower and middle class. I can think of better ways of collecting taxes.
> Addictions don't reason.
That argument was specifically based on how gambling feels and not reasoning.
> Win $10 and some people are hooked for life.
That sucks, but ease of addiction is a spectrum.
How do you explain the school teacher spending $200 per week, then? The teachers here collectively own one of the world's largest hedge funds. These are very wealthy people.
Still, the portfolio is public knowledge, so we can also verify what they say. In this case a stopped watch is still right sometimes.
Very, very few people spend $200 a week on lottery tickets -- they spend a few dollars here and there a week. (Spending $200 is just silly and barely increases the chance of winning or return -- if someone can't see that, well, can't stop them from wasting money) Of course, I would like state lotteries to be further restricted, but that's still much much better than online sports betting -- people can lose six digits of wealth quickly, and that has a much bigger and immediate impact on lives than state lotteries.
Global warming suffers from "but it rained yesterday" and other misleading small scale variations making people disbelieve.
"More fires, more hurricanes: Climate change" then rebrands it as scary: need to take seriously.
Sports and alcohol seem to have a long history together.
But then I remember that so many are counting on the fact that people will stay uneducated so they can rip them off.
People see it as a game of skill where they win money from people who are worse at that skill than they are.
do you think heroin addicts and cigarette smokers never heard that it was bad for them?
For instance, Portugal had a crisis 25 years ago with sky high number of drug related deaths, HIV infections etc. The solution was decriminalization and education, e.g. about sharing syringes. And it worked, they went from the worst I drug related deaths to best. Heroin is still bad for you and I guess people still use drugs, but at least the outcome is not catastrophic anymore.
So yes, I do think education cures a lot of problems.
There is nothing unique about sports gambling here.
You can extend this to things like poker as well - is that a tax on people bad at math? Of course not, that'd be a stupid argument, because it's not a purely negative expectation game.
Sports betting exchanges are unique compared to other traditional gambling options.
Its a genetic issue.
You could end up with children who have the same issue.
Giving the rat a lever to randomly apply cocaine or an electric shock is bad for the rat, even if the rat is addicted to pulling that lever.
So if this is your take, then you should be perfectly willing to be heavily taxed on all of your bets so that those who can't control themselves can receive prompt and proper care to revert their addiction, and assist their families to recover from the financial ruin caused by forces outside of their control; understanding that an addiction is often uncontrollable without a lot of time and a lot of help.
If you have a problem with that, then you are signaling that you only care about society's strengths, because you are benefiting from them, and not its weaknesses, because you have not felt the gravity of a boot on your neck in awhile. Thus, I believe that your opinion is moot and also in the minority.
Many years ago I worked at a company that had Ladbrokes in the UK as a customer. On my first visit to London, I noticed their storefronts and found them appalling. They were some of the sorriest, shabbiest public spaces I'd seen, clearly designed to extract resources from the least well off.
I don't really buy any of the arguments in favor of widespread legalization (and I include state lotteries in this). I could be ok with legalization for a few big events like the NCAA tournament because clearly there is some demand that must be met, but we should not be enabling gambling as a widespread daily habit.
Of course there will always be black market gambling and the state cannot protect its citizens from every evil, but nor should it actively enable them.
People pointing this out often leads me to an impression that athletes should be allowed to bet on their own games. Problem is, that leads to match-fixing.
However the government is a monopoly, and has a monopoly on violence. Giving a mafia that can take your house away or put you behind bars their own casino is an incredibly bad idea.
I suspect it's because unlike the lotto and games of chance, people can delude themselves into thinking they "know" the sport. It's not a gambling if they know better. It's also easy to externalize the blame for your loses "they would have won if not for <bad call, bad play, bad management, injury, weather, etc... Or combination thereof>"
You can dip your toe in betting on the obvious mismatched, where it's pretty clear who will win. This is priced into the bookmaking, so the payout is little, but this helps people convince themselves they do know the sport and chase longer odds with better payouts.
And then you get sunk cost fallacy, as they lose, they convince themselves they can win it back because they learned from before and their system will work this time.
At least (very loosely) with the lottery it's kinda random and your odds are "set" or rather your payout is not proportionate to your chance of winning. It's a happy surprise kind of thing as long as you don't overdo it.
Basically, as a guy on the street, you don't have a clue and you're up against MIT-tier brains trying to beat you.
It's interesting to me that more people don't realise this is intuitively obvious, though. No-one would look at the Olympics and think, oh yeah, I can run faster than Usain Bolt.
If you have a reliable way to beat the odds (ie. Inefficient betting markets that get the odds of success wrong) you can theoretically make money - but its a similar scenario to daytrading, where you need to do extremely well because you have to overcome the negative drag from the booky take too.
There is demand it's not clear that it "must be met." The problem is not the betting or oddsmaking, the problem is, how do you handle settlements?
You're presenting the false dichotomy, that we should just allow gambling, because it's inevitable, and we can occasionally use the violence of the state and it's courts to run the settlement racket on behalf of short changed bookies.
> but we should not be enabling gambling
And we have no reason to. We should harshly penalize people who try to collect on gambling debt and they should have no access to the courts or to sheriff's over problems arising from it.
> cannot protect its citizens from every evil
That's why this is all so insidious because it's really only one you need to actually protect them from. Suddenly you'll find the industry self regulating customers with an obvious illness out at the front door. They'll get amazingly good at this.
My gut these days tells me its probably better for the humans in society if this stuff is left only to black markets because it seems like it destroys lives.
But these commercial gambling halls, it's not some well of person who decides to pop in Friday afternoon and maybe lose €20 on a crazy sports bet or the slot machines and then go home and have dinner with the family. It is the some of our weakest and loneliest people who line up, waiting for the place to open and then spend the next 10 hours there. There are places who will provide free food for their best "customers", to ensure that they don't leave. We're transferring money from social welfare to private companies, using addiction and loneliness.
As for sports, I don't think professional soccer would like a ban on sports gambling. The revenue and salaries it have generated are to high for them to walk away now. It is hurting the sport though, in the sense that the community and local fans have been pushed out long ago. A local football club had to leave the premier league a few years ago, as a result they could no longer charge insane prices for tickets at the stadium. The result: They had more fans come to every single game, they sold more season passes, because the fans still wanted to see the games, and now they could afford it. Sure, they made less money, but the connection to the fans and the city grow.
Your post made me think more about sports betting vs a lottery. To me, they really are different. With a lottery, you need to wait days to get the result (mostly). The chance for multiple quick dopamine hits is exceedingly low. (Scratch tickets and high speed lottos are another matter.). Now think about sports betting: So many simultaneous events or races, so the customer (user?) has many more chances for multiple quick dopamine hits. Maybe a potential framework to talk about gambling harm is opportunities for for multiple quick dopamine hits. If very low, then many tolerate it in their community, especially if a significant portion goes to social causes.
One thing I am absolutely sure about: Advertising for sports betting should be banned. I put it in the same class as cigarette ads as a child. Damn they looked so cool and fun. What a terrible message to spread!
Poor people who trade their grocery budget for gambling undeniably cause trouble for a population. Do rich people who trade their luxury handbag budget for gambling equally cause trouble for a population?
Unfortunately, since gambling is only recently more accessible/prevalent, I think it's going to take a few mishaps to produce similar regulations.
> pattern day traders must maintain minimum equity of $25,000 in their margin account on any day that the customer day trades
> pattern day traders cannot trade in excess of their "day-trading buying power"
> If a pattern day trader exceeds the day-trading buying power limitation, a firm will issue a day-trading margin call, after which the pattern day trader will then have, at most, five business days to deposit funds to meet the call.
> Day trading, as defined by FINRA’s margin rule, refers to a trading strategy where an individual buys and sells (or sells and buys) the same security in a margin account on the same day in an attempt to profit from small movements in the price of the security.
(emphasis original)
There are no restrictions on trading with your own money, whether you can afford it or not.
It makes no sense, it is the person's money and life, and it is theirs to ruin as they wish. We are not properties of the state. If a person cannot be allowed to do what they wish with their own money, because they might harm themselves or others as a result, then how can you trust them with driving a vehicle, flying a plane, operating weapons in the military, or even owning a personal weapon?
Every gun sold to a person is a gamble on whether they use it to cause harm on others (same with the things i listed above).
This same logic applies to regulation of drugs in general as well in my opinion. Regulating other peoples lives is not the purpose of the government, especially when they're not harming others or being a nuisance to the public.
Comparing Oranges to Potatoes. People involved in gambling are not stupid. They are either 1. Not quite smart or mathematically smart, so they don't understand the odds or 2. Addicted to gambling in the same way someone is addicted to Tobacco. Of course, there is 3. Having a little fun with a little money; but this is not the audience that's making money for gaming.
I agree.
> Addicted to gambling in the same way someone is addicted to Tobacco
Addicted people are still responsible for their actions. case in point: drunken driving. I agree with punishing gamblers that cause harm. but gambling itself should not be regulated. Tobacco, alcohol, hard drugs,etc.. they should all be allowed. But to balance that, punishment for crime needs to be severe when you're an addict.
The first people gamblers harm is their own family - long before any formal crime has been committed.
How can we regulate what a person does with their hard earned wages from their labor and precious time and then still claim that person has liberties of any kind? If you think about it, this is the one and only fundamental liberty that is foundational to all other liberties.
Even slaves get food and shelter as well as some freedom of movement and expression. What they don't get is to be able to buy what they want and own it.
3 of these require significant training or at least licensing and the last one is banned in the majority of western nations.
I'm with you that personal responsibility and freedom should be the norm, but active predators (Drug dealers, bookies, social media companies) should probably have limits put on what they're allowed to do.
For your last statement, I agree, "active predators" should be restricted or punished because their intent is to cause harm at the cost of others for profit. but if they're just selling the "drug", why should that be restricted? You can force them to inform their customers of the harm,but that's about it.
This is the entire gambling industry! Do you think they don't know that their best customers are addicts who are blowing their kids' college fund?
These are all fairly strongly regulated. Did you choose bad examples on purpose?
So like,what about making gambling work like credit cards: you get a license that allocates a monthly cap based on a combination of credit score and income. It starts very low and scales up to, I don't know, 10% of income?
We should be free to ruin ourselves if we so wish, but if we are set on a track like that, others should be made aware so they can react as they wish.
Same with drugs, if you get a drug use license, then employers can deny you jobs, you may not be allowed to drive, be trusted with loans,etc..
You get rights, but they come with responsibilities and restrictions.
Crime goes up, bankruptcy goes up, corruption in sports goes up, etc.
I agree that people should be given freedoms, but we live in societies and people aren't independent, disconnected, autonomous units.
You don't deserve any rights or liberties if you can't accept the rights of the drug addicts,gamblers, homeless people and many more types of people out there.
It is a fundamental aspect of the human experience to self-determine one's fate.
It is unfair and unjust to punish someone based on probabilities. A innocent person should not be treated like a criminal. A free person shouldn't be treated like a prisoner or a slave.
The government has no authority to punish citizens because they might commit a crime. Citizens are subject to the rule of law. But in exchange for compliance to the laws, we expect a fair and just treatment under that law. That is the contract.
you are either being hyperbolic, you are irrationally ideological, or you haven't thought about this enough.
surely you don't think that people should be allowed to have nuclear explosives in their house because until they have actually used them they haven't actually committed a crime yet. different people can have different ideas on where that line is but you must acknowledge that it exists.
Maybe cars are sane analogy. You need to pass all kinds of testing and regulation to be allowed to drive a car or build and operate your own car, but only on public roads. You can in fact buy any kind of car you want or build one and operate it as you wish on your own property without any license. Even though cars can be used as dangerous and deadly weapons (terrorists use them on crowds all the time).
Yes, a line exists, that line is when you are engaging in privileged activity like driving, flying on a commercial plane or train, entering school property and such.
Maybe it might be productive if you used specific scenarios where you think allowing gambling would cause harm to others in and of itself, not as a side-effect (your nuke example is a direct effect).
My overarching objection is that such laws are simply lazy. That laziness is infringing on people's liberties. Cigarettes are a good example, they shouldn't be outright banned as we both agree, but second-hand smoking should be banned as it affects others. I would even go as far as to say smokers should have higher premiums for the rest of their lives (I was one myself) when it comes to health insurance and such deliberate mishandling of your body might even cost you priority treatment for anything subsidized by the public. I am not against consequences at all.
I think like many legal issues, it boils down to what is "reasonable". If a "reasonable" person would find that possessing a nuke is an immediate danger to the public then of course possessing one doesn't amount to the government interfering in private lives. That is not the same as gambling and drug use, where the reason for restricting them is not an immediate concern of danger but an indirect and probabilistic anticipation of harm to others, which even if true, there are many other steps that can be taken to disincentivize or punish potential harmful interactions without outright restricting those things.
For example with drug use, it should only be allowed under medical supervision, when used outside of your own property. And as I stated earlier, gambling is bad financial decision making, so the fact that you are gambling and the details of your gambles should be made very public, so that others can steer clear of you as needed. It shouldn't be possible for a person to use a joint bank account to fund a gamble (to protect spouses and families), spouses should get notifications when their other half is gambling,etc.. That's hard and specific law making, instead of the lazy and unjust law making we have today.
I strongly believe it is better to have something legal and well regulated than illegal and left to illegal operators.
This is true for a number of vices.
With legalisation should come strong regulation, including advertising bans.
The UK made this mistake when they strongly de-regulated gambling in the early 2000s, it seems the US did not learn from that when legalising.
the predatory part is the siphoning money off from the lottery to pay for "shools,etc." but if there is inelastic demand for lottery gambling, that also makes rational sense.
The largest are probably mobile betting and allowing for instant credit card deposits.
There is also the fantasy of being able to win money but the reality that if you actually win money in a consistent fashion, you will be either kicked-off or your action will be severely crippled.
I'd like to think the emerging prediction markets, like Polymarket, are much fairer systems, especially for winning players, and would be much better than sports books like DraftKings, FanDuel, etc.
Not to mention the Pandora's box that prediction markets open, when the order book can begin to influence real life events - from match fixing, to assassination markets.
The upside of prediction markets is that it incentives people with information to make their honest estimates legible to society. E.g. an opinion piece in a newspaper has little skin in the game, other than the author's reputation.
This does not apply to all bookmakers. Also, betting exchanges exist where the players bet against each other therefore there is no incentive for the operator to ban winning players.
Reshape the entire industry to be a decentralized/house-edge-free form, where any one player has a net 0% gain/loss outcome over time. Regulate what bets can be placed and their payouts so that winners win less amounts and losers lose less amounts (i.e. you don't get wiped out).
It will feel like gambling, but overtime is no different than coin flipping for lunch money with a coworker every day. Essentially math away the "house always wins" part.
Thus, your proposal might actually work, except what's in it for the rubes?
A problem is infection. As Sports Betting is more legal and profitable, Fantasy Sports gain more Sports Bets and pseudoanonymity and lose some of their community spirit for "micro-transactions" and other "extreme gamification" and the line between each blurs. (Including to the point where groups looking for one might be easily confused into doing the other.)
I idly wonder if there is a way to shore up Fantasy Sports against the tide of Sports Betting profit.
I think you could raise money and then sustain a lean business.
It’s not that casual bets between friends should be banned, but this insidious industry that spends 100s of millions on marketing, and uses every tactic available to lure people and then get them addicted. That is such a far cry from not wanting people to gamble at all. Those who want to be a nanny and say boo hoo gambling bad are in a totally different category to the people who reasonably think that there’s a serious issue with this industry.
https://archive.ph/CmsIZ
When, in your own time, your ignorance leads you to make "stupid" decisions, I hope there's a safety net in place to protect you and people who depend on you. I also hope there's a support network to help people you mislead with your idiotic parenting, should you breed, which at the moment I hope you choose to defer.
In the meantime enjoy congratulating yourself for accomplishments you almost certainly didn't earn purely in virtue of your perceived "intellectual superiority" while denigrating others for mistakes we could have helped them avoid.
Your lack of compassion does not withstand rational scrutiny. I sincerely hope that as you gain experience in the world you continue to reflect on your relationship with other human beings, and that in your own way you develop a deeper and less idiotic understanding of others.
We can, and should mitigate the harm to individuals and families that stems from said "stupidity" through... precisely... regulation.
Go to a GA meeting some time. People who develop crippling gambling addictions are exposed to gambling precisely through going to a casino "as a gag to throw away expendable income," the same way most alcoholics are exposed to alcohol through casual, healthy drinking. No one walks into a casino thinking "let's throw my life and the financial security of my family away," and the proclivity for such is not readily predictable with any meaningful precision at present.
The inference to draw from this is that we should reduce harm through regulation, not double down on the damage we're causing and writing off the resulting, predictable damage as immaterial because the "people were stupid."
Like... what is your actual goal? Increasing human misery? Creating a society in which people predictably suffer from the predictable, catastrophic consequences of unregulated enterprise?
(This isn't even touching the blanket categorization of everyone who develops a crippling addiction as "stupid," which doesn't withstand even superficial scrutiny. What's the point of that blanket demonization?)
The medicalization of the underlying problem should push you towards an epidemiological perspective on the problem, not a thin, incoherent moralizing knee-jerk.
Like... "you can't fix stupid" - sure, my grandmother was scammed while declining into (heretofore undiagnosed) dementia. Is the inference to draw "she's stupid, let's permit unfettered exploitation of people?" No, it's let's keep financial fraud illegal, prosecute the scammers, take some steps to help grandma prevent a repeat, and behave like sane, compassionate individuals.
G’day.