Will Supreme Court open a ‘dam burst’ of legalized sports betting?
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The reason for that hope is that gambling and gambling advertising, with the rise of online betting sites and smartphone apps, has started to become a fairly genuine social issue. With advertisements like this one (https://twitter.com/sportsbetcomau/status/863634984682233856) [note: Ben Johnson recently was found to be on PEDs], or advertisements blanketing one of the busiest train stations in the country, like the following (https://twitter.com/Doc_Samantha/status/786665869787078656). These companies are, anecdotally of course, targeting their advertisements to the youngest possible market, in the worst possible way. The pushiness of their advertisements are a 'joke' amongst my friends.
Widespread gambling is generally seen as harmful to a society. It would be nice if the USA didn't voluntarily allow its citizens to be taken advantage of for corporate profits, for once.
Organized crime would probably a step up from state lotteries.
Sure maybe legal gambling will let young people move from sketchy books to more legitimate operations, but they aren't really the ones that get abused by legalized gambling.
Casinos will find a way to exploit old folks with this, I guarantee it. Old people often have about as much going between their ears as ~11-13 year olds but have a lot more disposable income.
How are things different now? Do you think it's just that if you grow up around legal gambling and you're the type to waste everything you have on it, you won't have any money left to gamble away by the time you're old?
Everyone who gambles understands that sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, and if the casino lost more than they won, it wouldn't be a casino at all.
No one is told they will always win. True, there is manipulation, but all advertising is based on manipulation, as is most of our media.
Why don't we talk about banning alcohol? From deaths to sickness to loss of quality of life, alcohol is the grand-daddy of vice! But coastal liberals love their Pinot Noir, craft beer and boutique small-batch scotch, so instead we talk about limiting the vices of red-staters (guns, gambling, tobacco)
everywhere in society we are expected to overcome and be responsible for our base urges
OK, you've convinced me. When do we make our move on the gambling halls? Before we shutter the taverns and the churches, or afterward?
My experience in Australia doesn't generalise perfectly to the US, of course. I wonder how much it does at all. That lack of certainty doesn't stop me from worrying what things would look like if it translates well across our societies.
I never called them dim-witted in a mean sense, I mean that when you are old you aren't able to think with the same mental acuity as you once could. People with Alzheimer's or that are beginning to grow senile really are like children, and they are susceptible
The government (via the NCAA) has already made it illegal for college athletes to accept money for anything related to sports. IMHO that ban has worked well for college athletes, and the feds should simply extend the ban to the rest of society and make pro sports illegal.
What? The NCAA has nothing to do with it. The US federal government independently created regulations that make payment of student athletes undesirable regardless of whether the NCAA even exists. Title XI requires that all collegiate athletes receive identical opportunities and benefits, which clearly doesn't make sense for sports that aren't profit centers if cash compensation is added to the mix.
>the feds should simply extend the ban to the rest of society and make pro sports illegal.
Why? This clearly doesn't solve a gambling issue, as you can already place bets on NCAA events. And further, it doesn't really make sense given the economic structure and social mores of the contemporary United States. Aside from the fact that a ban on pro sports would fly in the face of centuries of case law prohibiting arbitrary government interference with private enterprises, I'm fairly certain that any representative sample of the contemporary US population would find your proposition both strange and unnecessary.
> Aside from the fact that a ban on pro sports would fly in the face of centuries of case law prohibiting arbitrary government interference with private enterprises
The new research on health outcomes for pro athletes is more than enough to overcome the requirement for non-arbitrariness. And given how many other strange and unnecessary laws there are, this might not be as serious of an issue as it seems.
The illegality of paying college employees fair wages has resulted in for profit companies/universities making hundreds of millions of dollars off of people.
Why should we extend that and allow MORE people to be exploited?
It is crazy to me that people support making it literally illegal to pay workers wages.
By that logic nothing should be illegal as making anything illegal simply creates a black market. Some things are bad. Some things are just evil and need to be banned. Laws are meant to prevent people from doing things they otherwise would want to do.
Gambling is a classic vice. If people want it banned then they should be able, through government, to ban it. That has happened at the federal level already. Rather than attempt to lawyer their way out from under the ban, states should lobby their people to elect reps that will change the federal law.
Gambling is something that already exists a number of places in the US in many forms. Lotteries, casinos, poker games, office betting pools, and more are cultural mainstays. You're not going to be able to get rid of it quickly or easily, nor make it stay gone. People really like their games of chance.
Even if I did agree with you that gambling is just evil and needs to be banned.
If this was put to a national referendum today, no more than 10% of the votes would be to ban gambling. People enjoy it and are overwhelmingly capable of grasping the risks. For those that can't, stay away or phone that number on the sign in the casino that puts you in touch with a gambling addiction counselor.
Silicon Valley has such a myopic worldview...Facebook and Twitter are much more harmful to the fabric of society than a one-armed bandit in Vegas.
These are my opinions. They're not objective fact, and they're honestly not well-researched enough that they'll all provide measurable benefit, but I also don't think there's any way these things could make things worse for our country.
Gambling/bettings have put a lot of work into getting their slimy tentacles into sports clubs and RSL's and perpetuating this idea that gambling/betting is inherently part of sport, which it's not, but they're happy to lure people and profit off them all the same.
If we reigned them in, I really don't think anything of value would be lost.
Where I previously lived we would occasionally go for meals at our local pub and the dining area was pretty much always quiet, I doubt that they would exist if they were relying on dining income.
Australia also has the Melbourne Cup horse race/ public holiday, where there is a culture of having a bet. People who otherwise would never look into gambling bet on that race, I think it acts as a gateway to further gambling and normalises gambling even further.
In this article (http://www.heraldsun.com.au/leader/north/news-story/535a0090...) about the shadiness of the Preston RSL, they admit that the bar and bistro lose money, and the only thing keeping them in the black is gambling.
(Don't get me started on cup/derby day. That whole situation is a mess.)
Because of this, it is not a stretch for me to imagine that gambling advertising will be restricted in some ways. The fact that mobile games (and mobile and internet advertising) are such a big part of the culture and technology will certainly complicate things.
It dismays me when I see large sporting teams sponsored primarily by a gambling company. Sport is a wonderful active activity for young people in a world increasingly struggling with obesity - and the companies into their heads early worries me.
Lotteries, and then there are tons of casinos.
Something similar, minus the gangrene, should be done for gambling.
Recently? Wasn't he caught in 1988?
(I have no idea who Ben Johnson is or was. You are probably correct, and I probably look silly.)
Well I do recall that as soon as he was caught, some in the Canadian media cynically referred to him as Jamaican.
Self-determination of peoples, and all that...
> Self-determination of peoples
People in Newark have self-determination in Washington; they elected those government officials too.
Well, you're right about that. In practice New Jersey can be forced to commit to go further than what they've agreed to. That doesn't make it right.
> People in Newark have self-determination in Washington; they elected those government officials too.
This is a bit of a distortion of the concept. If the UN started telling your country whether it could legalize gambling or not (totally unjustified by anything in the UN charter) and had a military to back this up, would you still feel like you had "self-determination" because you get one vote in the General Assembly?
I don't see how the UN is anything like the U.S. government, in terms of the self-determination of people in NJ. (And of course the UN and U.S. government are unalike in many other ways too, beginning with the fact that one is a sovereign, democratically legitimate government and the other is a multilateral international organization. The UN is more like ISO than it is like the U.S. government.)
It helps that the TAB has a monopoly in sports betting, so there's less incentive for them to advertise, due to a lack of competition. I don't think I've ever seen an ad for the TAB.
Gambling addiction is just as much a real thing as tobacco or alcohol addiction, yet there are limits on the advertising for alcohol, and advertising tobacco is forbidden.
We allow daytrading while you drink! Impaired daytrading!
Soon in California you will be able to be under the influence of marijuana while you daytrade!
If anything, I would like to see gambling completely in the open across the entire US. Prohibitions against it are a silly throwback.
If you are an adult and want to spend your life savings on craps, go for it. If you lose all of your money, sorry but you are an ADULT.
I love going to Vegas. Most times I don't gamble at all. My wife knows to stop when she is down $1k. She KNOWS that with almost 100% certainty, she will hit this limit. She even enjoys a drink while gambling. If this experience is beyond the discipline of other people, they should stay away and let the ADULTS enjoy themselves.
Our notions of legislating away all risk is inane. Just this weekend my friend was threatened with a $650 fine for riding his mountain bike on a Santa Clara County trail without a helmet. What? What next, will I be put in a police car if I go jogging without elbow pads?
Sadly what I have come to learn about our society is that almost all vested interests get what they want eventually by just persisting in the long term to keep bringing it back to the government through their lobbyists.
Gambling, privacy reduction, net neutrality, mining, fracking, selling national interests overseas, property development... everything happens eventually if those with the money just keep pushing firmly over time.
It's almost a prerequisite that these things are first resisted by the people and defeated by people power a few times... the vested interests know that the 2nd and 3rd time around people will stop fighting for whatever that thing is.
And this is why the SCotUS will not make a landmark decision causing a "dam burst." The Justices can certainly limit their decision in many ways, and it'll be interesting reading the opinions that they produce. But I don't think they've been interested in drastic changes for quite some time.
I've been slowly getting into Machine Learning for a while now, and have been looking for projects to accelerate my focus. I also happen to like to gamble (responsibly), so I've recently started researching how to apply Machine/Deep Learning to Baseball betting, and possibly other sports.
It would be mostly a side project I would imagine, I have no dreams of becoming wealthy from this, and since it mixes scraping (which I really like to play with) with machine learning, it will probably be entertaining at least. I'm very curious if I could actually get decent success with it though.
Anyone done this before? Or know of stories/books about this?
tldr: keep it fun; if you bet professionally, you'll run into hurdles from bookies.
http://www.espn.com/blog/playbook/dollars/post/_/id/2935/mee...
ML is often just stats under the hood in most cases -- I think I am targeting neural networks specifically with this comment.
As for predictive analytics themselves, you can dig into all the metrics you want, but training/backcasting is how I'd approach it.
Finding a problem someone has, solving it with analysis, and offering to license/sell it to them (once it's proven to work) is probably more lucrative.
Unless you're chasing the variable rewards skinner box. In that case, I'd probably just take up a cocaine habit -- it'll be cheaper.
I've won 4 of my last 9 baseball "futures" bets, with more than 2-1 payoffs (some were to make the playoffs, or o/u games won, etc.) That's the way to bet on baseball -- use a large sample size. It's easy enough, once the futures lines come out, to find bets that clearly have a positive expected outcome, when using advanced sabermetrics (the baseball term for "statistics" aka Moneyball).
Unless this is a passion, take the time you have allocated to running the analysis, and use it in a healthy manner. Or multiply it by your hourly wage. Then read fangraphs or BP to find the exploitable futures lines.
DFS NBA is much more predictable, but then everyone else knows that too so it's also much more competitive. You've got to be seriously dialed in to have any edge at all.
I feel like the PGA is still the softest DFS sport. Lots of unexplored territory there, but not giant amounts of money to win.
Develop a good system with decent results, sell the recommendations. I've watched this play out in daily fantasy sports over the last few years and I'm convinced it's second only to running the betting sites themselves, only with infinitely less hassle.
I am heavily involved in gambling (trading), posted a simple article on using ML as well recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15739468
Feel free to join our slack group:
I lack siblings.
> or my brother is innumerate
You led with "maybe"; to keep my next sentence's structure from becoming a complete mess, I'll assume that your hypothetical is true.
If some random person tells me "my brother is innumerate" ... then why should that information be of any consequence to me, in the absence of further context?
EDIT: and by further context I mean further information about you or your brother.
You mean their brother? Presuming so, then my next paragraph applies to this item also.
> other humans in general.
But who? I draw much different conclusions from a physician or a programmer or a chemist or etc, than from a hobo or an organized-criminal or etc.
(Most) humans aren't emotionless machines, even highly intelligent people engage in self-destructive behaviour despite recognizing it as such.
There are probably several hundreds of millions of personnel who will produce more net-worth in their lifetimes than I will in mine (and who therefore have a greater right to their lives than I've to mine; but that's not important right now). Where in this thread have I made a claim about myself that was more extreme than that?
Indeed, and much to our detriment. Which is why...
> even highly intelligent people engage in self-destructive behaviour despite recognizing it as such
... this justifies permitting those with self-destructive abilities to exercise their abilities; such that the intelligent people who remain, are both intelligent and resilient.
Gambling would be pretty low on social good list.
The same cost savings could be realized by simply not providing healthcare for the complications of chronic overeating.
(The only downside of such a plan is that the complications of chronic overeating can sometimes fail to onset until after the patient has reproduced.)
Will you destroy all of your personal stock of this poison for the benefit of society and forsake it forevermore? If not, why not?
And I'll gladly forsake it quietly, and let those with excess affinity for it, use it to destroy themselves if they so desire. We didn't need such weak people anyway.
(Oh, wait, we're still socialistic in exactly that manner. So I'd say we need many more people like me. But that will have to wait 'till genetic engineering exits the drawing board...)
Exactly. Full stop.
> burden to society
They are only burdens because our society takes people upon itself as burdens. This socialism ought be solved directly rather than worked-around by things like gambling bans and other such legislative nannying.
Gambling, on the other hand, does not impart any benefits whatsoever upon its sufferers, and that is why I argued it ought to be allowed for anyone stupid enough to want it.