Fingerprint coding may hold key to controlled gambling | Hacker News Reader

Fingerprint coding may hold key to controlled gambling

theage.com.au

8 pointsJ3L24045 comments

Like the governments care about problems gamblers. If they did they would close lotteries and scratchcards operations and liberalize sports betting.

Instead they want to tell people where to spend (lose) their money, while pretending they care.

In this case it's not about what "the government" wants. It's about what a couple of key independent members of parliament who just happen to be holding the balance of power want.

Lotteries actually aren't such a big problem as far as gambling addiction goes. Nobody ever "accidentally" goes and loses half their week's pay by playing the lottery, because the act of buying the ticket is so separated from the act of finding out you lost. But the poker machine sits there playing music and lulling you into a trance while it slowly empties your wallet.

Interesting. This could be extended to connect to your credit report or even a realtime indicator of your net worth.

A fool and his money are soon parted, of course, but when the fool is someone who's dependent on government largesse or already has a negative net worth, and the institution tempting him into further negative-expectation games is wealthy, intelligent and sophisticated about manipulating human biases, the transaction is unseemly and has negative externalities for society.

I would rather there be net-worth 'accreditation' for gamblers and other players of guaranteed negative-expectation games than for plausibly positive-expectation private investing.

While probably true, its just another example of the nanny nation making it easy to have no responsibility. I like to think this wouldn't get ten feet in the states, but I'm not so sure.

You'd think so, wouldn't you? But on the other hand, Australia is generally much more libertarian about gambling than the US is.

If you want to play a poker machine in the US, you've gotta go to Nevada (or Atlantic City, or an Indian casino, or a couple of other places). If you want to play one in Australia, just pop down to your local pub and they'll have a room full of them. There's also a casino (though only one) in every major city. And betting on horses is pretty much compulsory.

I don't like the idea of this law, but I do think it would be nice if people who have a serious problem with gambling could ban themselves from using poker machines somehow.

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