Who thought putting a casino in everyone’s pocket was a good idea?
nymag.com
nymag.com
You also have the option to tax corporate earnings to support these worthy initiatives. A portion of the revenue that would go to a CEO superyatch or dong-shaped rocket will be kicked in into a state's general fund. Just sayin'...
As a former resident, the thing you have to remember about Illinois is that for statisticians and politicians, Chicago is Illinois, but everyone not in dinner and a movie range disowns it, like it’s it’s own state.
If you witness someone at a party say they’re from Illinois, and someone says, “I’m from Illinois!” the conversations will go, “What town? Where’s that? Oh, Chicago.” “Oh Chicago” like you just said you hate dogs. I think people from downstate expect people from Chicago or any of the burbs to tell people they’re from Chicago, not Illinois. This is made worse when talking to foreigners, who can’t place Illinois on a map in their head until you say Chicago.
If you exclude Chicago from your mental arithmetic, any number of stats seem counterintuitive for Illinois. Including some things you might assume Mississippi or Alabama would be #1 for like racist courts. But given how much traction organized crime got there during Prohibition, and how many former mayors have been indicted, if you include Chicago then you can believe just about any horrible fact about Illinois.
I can see the day where they try to legalize child prostitution by kicking back 20% to schools.
It is NEVER the case where the proper way to fund an unfunded social need is to support the wholesale exploitation of the very group you’re funding.
On the other hand, is it worth the externalities? We ban drunk driving because of the extreme harm you can cause others. We ban smoking in a lot of places for the same reason.
Is the harm to society of easily accessible online gambling worth allowing consenting adults to consent?
If a proposition is a good idea and the people turn it down, they can try again next year.
If a proposition is a bad idea and the people vote it in, we’re stuck with it.
The cost for saying “no” and being wrong is much smaller.
On the ballot for 2022 in California is 1 constitutional amendment, 2 combined amendments/statutes, 3 statutes, and 1 veto referendum.
If it wasn't for that problem, I'd just be pro making casinos as straightforward to operate as opening an e-commerce shop. I have no qualms with adults gambling their money away, my problem is with mafiosos getting it all.
The situation right now is there is no reason for an illegal book to offer a better deal, and the worse deal is already illegal, so nothing would change by making it legal.
In many countries loteries advertise how much money was spent in tickets, and obviously they advertise the prize pool and the odds. As you can tell people still play, publishing the results does nothing. But that doesn't mean you should allow a free for all of fraudulent games. You see, most gamblers want to lose their money fairly.
Trivially exploited. The cool dude 85 casino will lie about all of its odds and make up the money-in, money-out difference when big whale cool dude 86 comes into town and soaks the casino for a few tens of millions on a private game of go fish.
Does somebody want to tell him?
If I gamble and I lose all my money and go bankrupt, that still doesn't necessarily harm others or even massively increase their risk of harm. Can't say the same for the other two actions.
I'd say it falls into a similar realm -- protecting those who can't protect themselves.
No its not the gore-splattered event of a drunk driving car accident, but it still tears apart families.
I think online gambling is in the same area socially.
I'm in a state that is in the process of legalizing it but it's not done yet but the social degradation and rise in crime is also happening here.
I cannot say its the sole thing that has caused the current state of affairs in the state, but it's been roughly 10ish years and the social decline started about at that time. Speaking with many locals (completely unscientific) but many feel like this was also the point in time where it brought it many individuals that did not have a plan in life but came for the green gold rush, or to merely be in a location where it was easier to buy and safe to use without risk of jail. Many believe it was this influx that started to erode society a bit. Homelessness and pan handling went up. Crime slowly went up. Etc....
Clearly there has a multitude of other contributing factors since then (covid, housing crisis, etc...) but this sort of started the ball rolling down the hill and the additional issues helped with momentum.
This might not be an issue with other states that are legalizing now because it's more available in several states but as one of the first few to legalize it, I feel it definitely hurt more than it helped.
> The fundamental conclusion is that the consequences of individual vulnerabilities are far more severe in locations with less accommodating housing markets. [0]
[0] https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/16/homelessness-is-a-housi...
As an easy counterexample, San Francisco had a rising population experiencing homelessness years before marijuana legalization in January 2018 [1].
[1] https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population
People moving to locations without a plan, and avg to high rental rates will naturally lead to more homeless people. We did have an influx of unprepared people due to legalization. And Im not saying legalization is purely to blame. Certainly possible it was all coincidence with timing. Market rebound, in tandem with people in low wage jobs not prepared for market shifts? Veterans coming back from a decade long war without a safety net (medical or financial), PE buying housing. There are plenty of possibilities. But going back to the original post, I believe that allowing online betting for people already in trouble is not going to help towns and cities in any manner. So I would worry about things getting worse before they will get better.
You haven't looked at any studies and have based your opinion on conversations you've had with people around you. You haven't had decades to talk about this either because weed was only legalized a couple years ago.
You claim that people are stupid and don't look at studies but that includes you by your own admission. If you're ok with that I guess that's fine but I would think you'd try to do something about it.
For what it's worth I agree with you about casinos, don't agree with you about weed.
Marijuana has been legal for almost a decade. When asking people who have lived here their entire lives when did the thing start to change, many have said when it was legalized things started to change for the worse. Not that it changed overnight, but it was a noticeable difference in the quality of life, and decreased since that point in time.
>I'm not trying to be glib but it sounds like you agree with everything I said. You haven't looked at any studies and have based your opinion on conversations you've had with people around you. > You claim that people are stupid and don't look at studies but that includes you by your own admission. If you're ok with that I guess that's fine but I would think you'd try to do something about it.
I disagree with much of it and you are misunderstanding the point I was trying to make, I feel like I did a poor job explaining it but it's not a big deal. Appreciate the back and forth.
The UK experience has shown how sports betting is popular as something spontaneous that fits into life, watching the game, etc. Mobile scratches that itch. For that matter, Sinclair broadcasting is interested in the ATSC 3 standard because it lets you transfer a web "player" to a TV set that could support sports betting through the remote control:
https://www.tvrev.com/news/broadcasting-atsc-3-gambling-nab-...
For many people sports betting is good clean fun that helps people get more fun out of the game, but for other people it is a dangerous behavioral addiction.
The thing about addiction is that addicts really need to get away from temptation to come clean. It is easy to keep away from the casino but with gambling in your pocket, advertised at the ballpark, advertised on the broadcast and even embedded in the broadcast, it's going to be very hard for people... A person with a gambling problem may have to stop watching sports entirely, which is a shame.
The problem with that is the broadcast delays; live betting will always be as fast as possible (so that people who are physically at the match don't get much of a window to place a "guaranteed winner" bet, e.g. "next player to score"), but the various broadcast methods can add up to maybe 20 seconds' delay and most people probably wouldn't want the betting overlay to tell them that someone had scored before the TV pictures show them the action.
You have clearly never been to the sports book at Circa Casino in Las Vegas. The big screen is three stories high.
It's probably an artistic choice but note that the seats in front of that screen are empty in the photo on that page.
There is an impressive looking sportsbook at the rural racino with huge TVs near me, I wind up there sometimes on "any given Sunday" because my extended family likes going there and I like to play the track when I know I the odds are in my favor, and it's never very busy.
Just because a slot machine has a guaranteed minimum payout, which in this case is 10 pieces of cardboard with nice pictures on them, doesn't make it not gambling.
This is much older than Wizards of the Coast
I think the scarcity that led to certain cards becoming more valuable was incidental rather than intentional, but I'm not an expert.
[0] https://www.amerlegends.com/the-history-of-marketing-basebal.... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_card
$999 for 4 packs of 15 cards in which 2 are rare. Not real magic cards - not valid for tournament play.
With multilands you must mean the Dual Lands and they have a lot of value. https://www.mtgstocks.com/lists/6 - even if they are from the revised set and have been played with we speak about at least $200 each and you probably had 20 or so in your deck.
If by original editions you mean Alpha (black border, round corners) and Beta (black border) - they have insane value depending on which cards of course.
Do you remember if the cards had black borders? Would love to see some photos of your deck :)
And yes, mostly Beta (black border), a few Alphas, and a lot of Unlimited, Arabian Nights, and Legends still in sleeves. I stopped collecting after that.
> Would love to see some photos of your deck :)
Would love to be able to find them and take those photos!!
I actually ran a business selling Magic cards back in '95. I'd go buy cases at wholesale and then sell them out of my trunk at retail with my buddy. Instead of taking profit, we'd open one pack for every one we sold, so I got all my money back and a shitload of rare cards. It was my most successful business in my career!
I played first in 1996 but had no money so no valuable cards, but I kept them all. I have now been spending around €2K to buy old cards (mostly revised and 4th edition) to make decks for playing with my son. We play an affordable format for old school, you can see more info here https://7pts-singleton.com/
Last summer we travelled to Madrid to be part of the Championship, me and my son - it was wonderful :)
Even under the least charitable framing imaginable, there's a world of differences between trading card games and slot machines. For starters, slot machines are not random; the payouts are are specifically preprogrammed to manipulate users into the patterns of behavior that maximize playtime and minimize total volume of payouts. When you learn about how they really work, it's actually shocking that slot machines are legal at all, because of the amount of explicit deception that goes on, compared to even roulette, craps, or even blackjack.
Not to mention that trading card games are multifacted; not only is it possible to participate in those games without interfacing with any of the aspects that could be construed as "gambling", but it's a known and actively encouraged set of playstyles. From the perspective of many users (including the most engaged ones), those aspects don't even exist, insofar as they don't interface with them at all.
I doubt it turns anyone into a gambling addict but it could show them how much money you can waste on it with no return.
Of course I have an adult friend that has bragged many times in the past about how much he sold individual MTG cards for but never seems to tally up how much he spent to get them in the first place, so…
I mark the difference as to whether you can simply buy the thing you want.
For MTG and its ilk, you can buy a card instead of open packs. In addition, you can sell any card you get. This is a little different from normal gambling in that these card games have an upside that is okay and a downside that is generally capped.
This is different from some of the online "gacha games" where you MUST gamble, and, even then, you are not guaranteed to cough up the card you want. And, even if you get the card, you generally can't sell it to somebody else. These have infinite downside and are flat-out gambling and need to be treated as such.
That's false. The manufacturer (Wizards of the Coast) does not sell individual cards. You have to gamble and buy random packs.
You're describing buying specific cards from people who have done the gambling already by buying packs and opening them.
This is true but glosses over the fact that you bought a thing. And you can buy and sell that thing--as can others.
In addition, most of the "boxes" that were sold for MTG were almost always net positive in terms of money spent. Yeah, make sure you preorder and don't buy from scalpers. However, if you spent $200 on cards you generally got slightly more than $200 in value if you kept them in good shape and then cashed them in later.
Contrast this to something like Genshin Impact where you simply cannot dodge the gacha mechanics in any way, shape or form AND you have zero idea what the probabilities are and whether the game company is being consistent (they almost certainly are not).
Side note: This example is, of course, one of the reasons why WotC is getting hammered for the 30th anniversary box. The MTG community appears to be quite sensitive to getting taken for a ride. So, there's clearly some difference between MTG-like games and pure gambling or gacha mechanics.
MtG cards are things out of physical necessity. If WotC could lock cards to whoever purchase them first, I've no doubt they would. They've been heavily pushing digital versions of the game lately, where they have the ability to control, limit, or eliminate the second hand market.
My understanding was that selling these is a bannable offense and that they are tied to the identity of the phone.
> If WotC could lock cards to whoever purchase them first, I've no doubt they would.
Oh, no doubt. MTGO tried that path and had a bunch of their big players boycott them. WotC got schooled real quick that their top players play this game precisely because they can make money at each level without gambling.
This is why MTGO still allows people to purchase individual cards as well as cash out their digital collections for real, physical cards.
Yes, it's a historical accident that WotC/Hasbro would change. Nevertheless, it is what sets the standard game apart from mere gambling.
(Don't get me started on the gorp that WotC/Hasbro pulls around their more expensive formats--Legacy, particularly. Yeah, that's pretty much back to straight up gambling.)
If your drug of choice is deep-OTM weekly options, it suddenly becomes straight up gambling.
but say, people blowing out accounts trading emini sp500 while having no idea what a futures contract is, sure why not
This seems to be an explanation ex post facto and not a reason for its genesis. This insane liquidity generation scheme is one of many expressions of the force that drives unbridled exponential growth, which we can now see is in excess of what our environment writ large can sustainably provide.
The pursuit of short term money-on-money returns is eating the world, and sycophants who personally benefit are turning blind eyes to this very basic and obvious fact.
(1) Stocks do make money in the long term. If you buy and hold broad ETFs like SPY and QQQ you can do very well on Robin Hood.
(2) The cumulative effect of people's speculation helps set prices and allocate capital. Even if many speculators loose, collectively the speculators have excellent judgement. It's as if the sports betting helped decide who wins the game.
(2) Slightly better argument, but retail orders don't have much effect on the market overall.
On the other hand, market makers don't want to trade against, say, Elon Musk buying or selling Tesla because they assume that kind of person knows something and they try to make them pay through the nose for liquidity. That is why people like that might announce well ahead of time the schedule that they plan to sell stock to diversify or raise funds and why there is a special sector of the industry to help move large blocks of stock, convincing buyers that they are not being exploited.
Did something happen to PredictIt? They look up to me, and I still get marketing emails from them. Not finding any news storied about their demise.
But after reading your comment I did a quick search and apparently they're suing the CFTC to remain open(?). So maybe there's a chance, but as of now it unfortunately looks like they're not gonna be running much longer :(
It was shocking the lack of basic knowledge people there have about the fundamentals of options pricing, their behavior and most importantly the risk involved. In itself this is not a big deal but through seeing conversations it was clear that many of these people are approved for very high level options trading and have margin accounts.
Options are fun to study because they are the real world application of a range of probabilistic tools, and properly managing risk involves lots of cool stats. But precisely because of this trading them really should be left to people that know what they're doing, otherwise they become an incredibly powerful foot gun.
But here's the thing. Options are a zero sum game, and currently 25% of options trading is retail. If I'm an institutional investor/trader this is great for me because it's like inviting a bunch of tourists to a poker table with professionals.
They even have everything down to suggesting they could use SMS marketing to make microbets during events, and putting cash on your books at a brick and mortar Boost Mobile dealer. Who else is up for putting money on their books at their prepaid wireless dealer?
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What makes this worse is Boost Mobile's statements to the press when T-Mobile announced the shutdown of the CDMA network: https://www.fiercewireless.com/operators/t-mobile-s-cdma-shu...
“The bottom line is this: T-Mobile’s anticompetitive Grinch-like decision to accelerate the shutdown of its CDMA network will likely harm millions of Boost customers that depend on access to this network for wireless connectivity, disproportionately impacting low-income consumers who over-index in communities of color.”
Dish and Boost Mobile KNOWS their client base and still thinks partnering with DraftKings is a great idea, especially when they weren't helping their "low-income consumers" easily upgrade to a new LTE phone during the network shutdown - instead, spending even more millions to partner with AT&T for roaming/coverage?
Unless otherwise confirmed or defended — this isn’t even possible, yet - I know you can’t do this on FanDuel, not sure about draftkings.
Imo this article is a great wake up call, but it’s not that real-time sophisticated as the op attempts to strongly imply.
Sports betting attracts some sophisticated players who make money like card counters because the odds are variable and it is possible to have better judgement than the crowd, although few bettors are going to succeed at that. Prop bets, however, are for suckers.
I can bet on Goals scored in next 10 mins and over / under on the number of corner kicks in the next 10 mins.
This is pretty minor game, I don't know if there are more real time possibilities on larger games.
The downside is that it led to a form of match fixing in cricket. Not fixing the whole match because that would take a lot of conspiracy but a bowler throwing a no-ball at a particular time was easy to do and only required the bowler(s) to be in on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_cricket_spot-fixing_s...
If you believe that I have some oceanfront property in Iowa you could buy
1: https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/inside-the-issues/2022/...
Because if there were $1 billion in illegal bets, and $20 billion in legal bets, which of those would be worse for society?
Bread and circuses. And sell the bread if you need a ticket for admission.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betting_controversies_in_crick...
To answer the question:
Gambling Industry, various US States and the politicians who took bribes (sorry, I mean campaign contributions). That is who thinks it is a good idea :)
Draft Kings is providing a safe way for people to gamble, without fear of a beating or loan sharking from a disgruntled bookie.
Oh, it goes to education, does it? No, it doesn't. Now education is financed from gambling proceeds, not a budget line item in the general fund. The money that used go to education is now diverted elsewhere. It used to be, some 30-40 years ago when I used to argue against state lotteries, that the states would just flat-out not used the gambling proceeds for education (it would go to roads, or whatever) after people stopped paying attention after a few years. Well, people started paying attention, so now the gambling money goes to education but what used to fund education goes elsewhere. Example after example over the course of decades, but we keep falling for it.
It's OK to advise me that gambling can be dangerously addictive, or that getting vaccinated is a good way to avoid getting sick.