Casino capitalism, literally (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Casino capitalism, literally (2021)

theamericanconservative.com

31 pointshhs23 comments

> The moral case against gambling transcends American Protestantism. Many Asian countries ban casinos and others restrict them to foreigners. In South Korea, 13 of its 14 casinos are off-limits to Korean citizens. China has no casinos at all, except in the enclave of Macau.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this doesn't look like a moral case at all, rather a practical understanding that mass gambling is a profitable social ill, so better to take money from foreigners while keeping your own citizens away.

If these countries had a moral "gambling is wrong" belief, I don't think they'd allow foreigners to participate either. And if they really believed in this cause and had the ability they'd try to lobby/coerce others to their cause.

The interesting part is that gambling profit is a pure externality.

In theory you could run a fair casino where the very small house edge is only there to pay the staff and rent, not the profits of the company.

With conventional monopolies at least you are getting a service or a product that is worth paying the profit. Gambling is designed to manipulate you into thinking it is worth the money, when it mathematically can't be worth it.

> The (Chinese) regime has calculated, presumably not irrationally, that the sacrifice (of not having mainland casinos) is worth it.

Or, they maintain that ban on legal gambling because the CCP banned it in 1949 when they took power, and it's just one of those things you keep doing because you've always done it.

Given how prolific illegal gambling in China is, what societal ills are they successfully preventing?

>The tools [Big Tech] uses to manipulate our brains are often the very same ones casinos use, flashing lights and dopamine hits spaced out at optimized intervals

I'm interested to know where the author draws the line between this ^ which they attribute to 'Big Tech', and the advertising industry in its entirety (which of course transcends just 'Big Tech').

My main disagreement with the article is the attempt to plant the religious conservative flag on objecting to casinos and gambling. Many american progressives, the european left and center parties, even the chinese communists almost unanimously object on these practices. In fact I'd say that anyone with a rudimentary sense of morality would not think of casinos as a net positive.

It's authoritarian vs libertarian (the vertical axis on the classic political compass) rather than left vs right.

To me it seems like the author makes an argument for social conservatism and not for authoritarianism. After all many social conservatives are extreme liberals when it comes to economics.

But are extreme authoritarians when it comes to personal behavior.

It just doesn't seem like a great article to me. This is just a type of social issue with no solution, only trade offs and no way to view the counterfactual so we can basically argue whatever we want.

If you want to prove one side of the argument just make an analogy with alcohol.

If you want to prove the other side of the argument then just swap cocaine for alcohol.

Mildly interesting, but the writer is misleading, specifically at the end. Maybe there was a scandal in Biloxi in 1951 (really?) with casinos, but more recent cases where casinos specifically targeted gambling addicts for predatory 6-figure loans (which they gambled away 5 minutes later) came out in the casino's favor. The argument for individual agency almost always wins in America, especially when big money is behind it.

Misleading? That is exactly her point. That back in 1951, casinos were seen as predatory, any individual agency defense was rejected. She's lamenting the fact that in subsequent decades, conservatism was utterly defeated by the proliferation of casinos.

> People said that casinos and slot parlors took advantage of traits that every human possesses... Abstract notions of freedom of commerce were not assumed to be a defense.

This is the sort of person who got a degree in writing essays and was never any good at it. Her target is NOT casino gambling. It's the 'Big Tech' boogeyman that conservatives hate nowadays. And if you cut out the third and final paragraph, you'd never know it. Given that she's such an absolute luddite, nobody should be shocked that she is enraged that casinos and tech companies use... modern product design techniques...

This is old man yelling at the sky level silliness masquerading as rational thought. I'd love to see her essay attacking oil and chemical companies for buying out riverfront land (eminent domain or otherwise) owned by families since before this country was founded to plop down gigantic, polluting refineries that raise cancer rates among people who never work there, but I doubt she likes that sort of parallel narrative.

I wouldn't think HN would find the thesis as applied to big tech so disagreeable, since people here have frequently say the same thing. For a while it seemed like every week there was a thread about all the people deleting their facebook account.

The distinction with oil, or any other sort of industry for that matter, is that the latter at least produces something that is useful to people, whereas gambling largely does not.

I found the lack of attention paid to big tech strange as well, but I could hardly complain, seeing as we've seen that discussion many times over, whereas the historical context regarding casinos was quite new to me.

The problem with the article is that it's written like an 11 year old was given a topic and she wrote an essay about the thing she was interested in at the time, then tried to shoehorn the actual topic in there.

People want to complain about Big Tech? Fine. Have some actual substance to your argument instead of saying something like "this guy who was barely Indian managed to coerce steel-factory landowners to sell them their land, and because they use A-B testing, that's why Big Tech is bad."

It's a stupid article.

In one recent year, gambling took in $72 billion in the United States; movie tickets, $9.5 billion; theme parks, $10.3 billion, cable TV, $51 billion. Gambling is bigger than any other form of recreation and entertainment in the country.

Revenue might be a misleading measure for a casino industry. If I bring $10 to the casino, win $100 in slots and proceed to lose it all, that will look like $110 in revenue.

No, it won't.

Do you know that? In typical broker-dealer tax reporting, gross sales would be reported as $10 billion dollars if you made 1000 low margin transactions with $10 million dollars. OP's point certainly isn't dumb and I'm now curious about how it's actually measured.

Yes, I know that. Also, I never said the OP was dumb.

You might have improved your original (or subsequent) comment by referencing a data point, source, or explaining why that isn't the case. Or even e.g. "source: I'm familiar with accounting rules in the industry."

Often, brevity is most effective.

Source: human being with life experience.

Work it through.

Person X spends $10 at casino C. C has gross profit of 10 at this point.

X wins! C pays X $100. C's profit on X is now 10 - 100.

X puts their $100 back into casino and leaves sadder and hopefully wiser. C's profit is now 10 - 100 + 100.

In other words, $10.

Payouts are an expense.

This isn't true either, not in an accounting sense. As in, there is no expense line in a casino's income statement for "payouts".

A casino's revenue is, with a few technical exceptions, the difference between all wagers made by customers and all payouts made back to them. So "payouts" are more like negative revenue.

It's sort of like Visa, when it processes a $100 transaction, it doesn't record $100 in revenue and a $97 expense. It just records $3 in revenue.

It's an important distinction since in most states in the U.S., casinos are taxed right off the top as a percentage of revenue, in addition to normal income, sales and employment taxes. (Not true of native American casinos, which are often exempt from most or all taxes)

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