> A quarter of bettors can’t pay a bill because of their wagers, a third have gambling debts, more than half carry credit card debts, and a quarter of them are afraid they can’t control their gambling.
No way. It's almost like these are addictive products being engineered to be as addictive as possible and deliberately punch people's brains in such a way to make them stay. That's so weird.
I am really tired of the lazy argument style of using "corporate" as a synonym for "bad". I too think it's bad to encourage addictive gamblers. I don't care if it is corporate, individual, or state run.
I don’t have an overly paternalistic view of the government. I’m rather libertarian in that regard. But is it too much to ask that we place some guardrails on things that are know to have trouble with? Smoking, drinking, gambling, etc.
I certainly feel that people should be able to do it if they really want to, but making it super accessible and highly advertised seems like a bad idea.
People are also leaving out stuff like Pokemon, Yu Gi Oh, and Magic The Gathering.
All of them also introduce rarities (arbitrary exclusiveness), hidden cards in a pack, and extreme gambling gamification.
The only non-gambling MtG packs are the preconstructed commander decks. All 100 cards are published. But the packs and boxes? Pure gambling, especially for the chase rare cards.
As a Magic player, yeah some people definitely have a compulsive addictive gambling relationship with the product. And Wizards has been leaning into that recently with more rare versions of mechanically identical cards.
However, you can buy sealed product to both build your collection and get cards to trade. And the main reason for sealed to exist, ostensibly, is limited.
And a lot of people don't interact with the "gambling" aspect at all. I'm very deep into magic after 10 years, and I almost exclusively buy singles and do prereleases. I might buy like 10 random packs total in an entire year.
1. Gambling is a real addiction. It is quite strange that someone using the term "Addiction Markets" fails to understand this. People who are gambling addicts were gambling before it was legal, they were just getting their legs broken in a way that was non-visible to you.
2. If you ban gambling, the ability of people to gamble online is not reduced in any way. None. The US offshore market was the biggest sports gambling market in the world before it was legalised. Not even close.
3. I would take a close look at how offshore gambling operators work before casting aspersions about onshore. Onshore, providers are working with regulators to an extremely significant degree. Offshore, sites will advertise that you can gamble on their site if you are on an onshore ban list. If onshore providers are so terrible, why is this the case?
4. The attempt to say that lotteries are addictive is just nonsense. Generally, there is a very poor understanding of what gambling addiction is (again, point 1). Certain games are designed to appeal to gambling addicts (again, the most prevalent ground for these was...the US...before online gambling was legal, biggest market by far, almost all the large companies making these games come from the US), those games are harmful. Lottery, sports gambling, raffles, DFS, etc. lack all of these properties. In particular, providers will often use virtual events (virtual horse-racing) to try to mimic the properties of more addictive products (with relatively little success)...because the original thing is not as appealing to addicts.
5. It is correct that the UK has "stake limits" (not quite sure what the author thinks this...all regulated US providers also have these, some states also have deposit acks...which would be beyond the UK standard, I would say many US states are ahead of the UK) but this is only on certain kinds of machines. The author spills a huge amount of words, talks about Trump, talks about the 1980s...but doesn't seem to talk about these machines, which are more prevalent in the US, at all. The author doesn't say anything about the issues in the UK being the same. VIP programs in the UK aren't regulated in any way different to the US (providers have no market lists). There is one important difference: in the UK, the government has given gambling providers that powers to perform extensive background checks, they take your income, an audit of your assets and then decide whether you can use their product...people opposed to gambling never mention this. How does that fit with neoliberal? A company being given the same powers as regulators?
6. There is an issue with corruption in the US. There is no coincidence that the law on online gambling changed within a few months of one of the largest donors blocking this. Both sides benefitted from this as the largest Democrat donor in those years was the Las Vegas casino workers union. Again, because this corruption meant that some kinds of gambling didn't happen...no mention. This was, we now know, hundreds of billions in value generated by paying politicians hundreds of millions a year...no mention.
7. The author appears to be unaware that DFS existed after UIGEA, not "laughable"...just a basic understanding of the sequence of events.
8. Gambling is not inherently addictive. Many things that are legal in the US are not only inherently addictive, but are inherently harmful. Liberals care about you losing your money when you buy a $5 scratch-off, they don't care about you losing your mind with mind-bending psychoactive substances.
On a somewhat related note, there seems to be a huge interest in vice policing on social media. Gambling, sex, drugs, these are some of humanity's oldest vices. Why has it become so popular on social media to highlight these, along with a narrative of social or cultural decline?
But if you want to outlaw this harmful activity [licensed gambling], you have to find a way to replace 6.4% of Maryland’s budget, which is slightly less than the entire amount the state brings in from corporate taxes.
A fraction of the proceeds of losing bets from a fraction of Maryland's citizens contributes almost the same to state services -- EMS, education, road maintenance, etc -- than the total corporate taxes levied on all businesses.
Do I misunderstand, or is this just actually incredible?
corporate tax makes no sense for states where you can hire a lawyer to change the home of your corp in a day. States impose income taxes which are harder to dodge and do less to disincentivize investment from corporations. What needs to change is federal capital gains tax, thats the main reason business owners pay such low tax percentages.
The incredible part is how that's only a tiny fraction of the profits the owners of that gambling operation are extracting from the citizens of maryland. Gambling addiction is a big in the human firmware, and we shouldn't allow private businesses to benefit from it, to the extent stem bwe can reasonably prevent it. Make the state the only source for gambling, make it low-dopamine, and get all the benefit for the state, with a sizable chunk devoted to treating gambling addiction.
I think this is a pretty good approach actually. Give people the freedom to gamble, but discourage it through taxes. It's best to tax things you want to discourage. So it's preferable to tax gambling rather than productive economic activity.
It feels like banning advertising for gambling would be a sweet spot between harm reduction and maintaining individual liberty.
Sports gambling ads have ruined sports media. State lottery ads are even worse. The government should not spend money to encourage its own citizens to partake in harmful activities.
I'm fairly pro-market, but I agree with this. I think people should do what they want if they don't harm themselves or others. Advertising these things are different...
I don't have a problem with people smoking or drinking, but I agree we shouldn't allow advertising. However, they should be able to advertise in adult only outlets.
ex: Does Playboy still have Cigarette and Liqour advertisements?
May I suggest just requiring people to register what how much they want to gamble and then be locked into that. If you want to gamble for 100 usd per month, then you can't bet more than that. You should be able to set your own amount, but any changes should only be active from the next month.
This has minimum impact on personal liberty, and will almost eliminate problem gambling.
"Make it legal but very annoying" is an underrated policy option. And banning advertisement is the first resort in this line of regulation.
If there are no ads to tell you, you have to, first, be informed that sports gambling is a thing people do, then decide that it's a thing you want participate in, and then obtain information on how it's done. This adds friction. Friction reduces participation. But if you really want to gamble? You still can.
I'd argue sports ruined their own product with ad insertion at every available opportunity (and even creating new opportunities to shove ads at you). If gambling ads were banned, it'd just be something else crammed down our faces.
We should do licenses for gambling that cap betting at some percentage of your income or wealth. For example: you earn 50k annually, you get to gamble 250 or 0.5%.
It's quite reactionary to label betting as addiction markets. I see little reason to draw that corollary to other, often detested, vices.
To label such activity as a tax on the poor is nothing more than a euphemism. I understand what is being said by the verbiage "tax" in this context. Although no real tax is voluntary.
Labeling this as an issue that disproportionately affects poor is misleading. This is an issue for a few select individuals who make poor decisions. The correlation for poor decisions and lower disposable income is higher than the contrary.
Wealthy by all means have the ability to wager more than they can afford. Often times, they wager significantly higher than average income individuals; however, they stay within their means
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 83.0 ms ] threadCoffeezilla: Exposing the Gambling Epidemic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45773049 - October 2025
Professional (and collegiate) athletics has always been corrupt - now it’s just more visible.
The only thing needing abolishing is the advertising of gambling.
No way. It's almost like these are addictive products being engineered to be as addictive as possible and deliberately punch people's brains in such a way to make them stay. That's so weird.
These are mostly men, and a very specific type of men. You can try to curtail their access to gambling but we're missing the underlying problem.
Problem for you maybe. A life lived in fear is not worth living at all
It might be something we should treat more like smoking.
- Require a disclosure of the EV of each bet as the user is placing it. E.g.: Expected loss $5.
- Ad targeting restrictions.
> if you need help making responsible choices, call…
Like, the only “responsible” choice is not to gamble online. What do they even think we’re supposed to take away from that line of the commercial?
I certainly feel that people should be able to do it if they really want to, but making it super accessible and highly advertised seems like a bad idea.
Off the top of my head:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-31/great-bri...
https://kyla.substack.com/p/gamblemerica-how-sports-betting-...
https://www.ft.com/content/e80df917-2af7-4a37-b9af-55d23f941...
https://www.dopaminemarkets.com/p/the-lottery-fication-of-ev...
https://www.investors.com/news/investing-gambling-robinhood-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-premier-league-footb...
https://www.ft.com/content/a39d0a2e-950c-4a54-b339-4784f7892...
All of them also introduce rarities (arbitrary exclusiveness), hidden cards in a pack, and extreme gambling gamification.
The only non-gambling MtG packs are the preconstructed commander decks. All 100 cards are published. But the packs and boxes? Pure gambling, especially for the chase rare cards.
And before anyone asks, yes, my username is based after this $2 card. https://edhrec.com/commanders/nekusar-the-mindrazer
I never understand why people "collect" these things
However, you can buy sealed product to both build your collection and get cards to trade. And the main reason for sealed to exist, ostensibly, is limited.
And a lot of people don't interact with the "gambling" aspect at all. I'm very deep into magic after 10 years, and I almost exclusively buy singles and do prereleases. I might buy like 10 random packs total in an entire year.
1. Gambling is a real addiction. It is quite strange that someone using the term "Addiction Markets" fails to understand this. People who are gambling addicts were gambling before it was legal, they were just getting their legs broken in a way that was non-visible to you.
2. If you ban gambling, the ability of people to gamble online is not reduced in any way. None. The US offshore market was the biggest sports gambling market in the world before it was legalised. Not even close.
3. I would take a close look at how offshore gambling operators work before casting aspersions about onshore. Onshore, providers are working with regulators to an extremely significant degree. Offshore, sites will advertise that you can gamble on their site if you are on an onshore ban list. If onshore providers are so terrible, why is this the case?
4. The attempt to say that lotteries are addictive is just nonsense. Generally, there is a very poor understanding of what gambling addiction is (again, point 1). Certain games are designed to appeal to gambling addicts (again, the most prevalent ground for these was...the US...before online gambling was legal, biggest market by far, almost all the large companies making these games come from the US), those games are harmful. Lottery, sports gambling, raffles, DFS, etc. lack all of these properties. In particular, providers will often use virtual events (virtual horse-racing) to try to mimic the properties of more addictive products (with relatively little success)...because the original thing is not as appealing to addicts.
5. It is correct that the UK has "stake limits" (not quite sure what the author thinks this...all regulated US providers also have these, some states also have deposit acks...which would be beyond the UK standard, I would say many US states are ahead of the UK) but this is only on certain kinds of machines. The author spills a huge amount of words, talks about Trump, talks about the 1980s...but doesn't seem to talk about these machines, which are more prevalent in the US, at all. The author doesn't say anything about the issues in the UK being the same. VIP programs in the UK aren't regulated in any way different to the US (providers have no market lists). There is one important difference: in the UK, the government has given gambling providers that powers to perform extensive background checks, they take your income, an audit of your assets and then decide whether you can use their product...people opposed to gambling never mention this. How does that fit with neoliberal? A company being given the same powers as regulators?
6. There is an issue with corruption in the US. There is no coincidence that the law on online gambling changed within a few months of one of the largest donors blocking this. Both sides benefitted from this as the largest Democrat donor in those years was the Las Vegas casino workers union. Again, because this corruption meant that some kinds of gambling didn't happen...no mention. This was, we now know, hundreds of billions in value generated by paying politicians hundreds of millions a year...no mention.
7. The author appears to be unaware that DFS existed after UIGEA, not "laughable"...just a basic understanding of the sequence of events.
8. Gambling is not inherently addictive. Many things that are legal in the US are not only inherently addictive, but are inherently harmful. Liberals care about you losing your money when you buy a $5 scratch-off, they don't care about you losing your mind with mind-bending psychoactive substances.
> Gambling is not inherently addictive.
What do you reckon makes gambling go from not inherently addictive to a real addiction?
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic>
https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/1984161085780263322
Do I misunderstand, or is this just actually incredible?
Related concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax
Sports gambling ads have ruined sports media. State lottery ads are even worse. The government should not spend money to encourage its own citizens to partake in harmful activities.
I don't have a problem with people smoking or drinking, but I agree we shouldn't allow advertising. However, they should be able to advertise in adult only outlets.
ex: Does Playboy still have Cigarette and Liqour advertisements?
This has minimum impact on personal liberty, and will almost eliminate problem gambling.
If there are no ads to tell you, you have to, first, be informed that sports gambling is a thing people do, then decide that it's a thing you want participate in, and then obtain information on how it's done. This adds friction. Friction reduces participation. But if you really want to gamble? You still can.
> The government should not spend money to encourage its own citizens to partake in harmful activities.
That's what goverment ever do.
To label such activity as a tax on the poor is nothing more than a euphemism. I understand what is being said by the verbiage "tax" in this context. Although no real tax is voluntary.
Labeling this as an issue that disproportionately affects poor is misleading. This is an issue for a few select individuals who make poor decisions. The correlation for poor decisions and lower disposable income is higher than the contrary.
Wealthy by all means have the ability to wager more than they can afford. Often times, they wager significantly higher than average income individuals; however, they stay within their means