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Comment by denkmoon | Hacker News Reader

Look at Australia for a cautionary tale on letting gaming companies do as they please. I've worked in the industry and I'm very much on the side of letting people gamble if they choose to do so, but _everywhere_ in our society is just plastered with ads for it. The volume of ads for gambling during a sports events can sometimes exceed the actual commentary on the event.

I'd ban gambling ads, and I'd ban pokies (tangential to this discussion but pokies are pure evil). I'd expand our self exclusion legislation to a national system and crack down on online retailers allowing the self exclusion system to be subverted.

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I live in Pennsylvania and there are “pokies” at every gas station and bar around me. One gas station 15 minutes from me even set up a mini casino looking place (glass enclosure) where you can smoke and drink the tall boys you buy on the premises. All sorts of fun characters at night there. You never see anyone happy sitting on these machines, and despite the name “Pennsylvania Skill” you never hear any positive stories about them. Purely predatory and should be banned or better regulated IMO. This is coming from someone who supports state lotto/sports betting/etc.

A buddy of mine works for Pepsi maintaining outside equipment and says how people go from place to place throughout the day just spending everything they have on slots. Harder to feel sorry for someone that eats and leaves a few minutes a day, every day than someone that sits at one place all day wasting everything they have.

Let me offer a counter argument from a gambling friend of mine. He says that, sure, he often loses but sometimes he wins. What about the foodie snobs who blow a fortune to eat some weird recipe? What about the theater snobs who pay a fortune to sit and watch some great actor? Or the backpacking snobs pay a fortune for some ultralight tent. They all end poorer (monetarily) because they never win.

It's kind of funny how the people who love things that NEVER pay off some how snark on the gambling world because it slowly eats away at your savings.

Do you think spending money is a form of gambling?

It sounds like the argument is that gambling is a form of spending money.

Nearly every nightclub, dance floor, live music venue, and even many restaurants in pubs that I had in my younger years were pulled down to create "VIP rooms", which is what we call "rooms full of poker machines".

It's hard to express just how depressing it is what exactly has been done to sydney.

I genuinely don't know where people go out to socialise in their younger years these days, I cannot possibly imagine being 18 and getting the mates together to blast $300 on poker machines.

Also Australia. My experience is different. We absolutly have a bunch of pokies room, but these go hand in hand with pubs, bistros and other standard entertainment options. The only thing pokies seem to have largely wiped out is the live music option which used to be fairly standard.

As for socialising, it's the same. At least for me, very few people I know hit the pokies. Plently of bars, pubs, cafes etc. It seems more to be lonely people who aren't socialising that take to pokies from my limited view.

Personally I think the need to wind them down. Do something like ban advertising and reduce licensed machines ~3% a year type thing and they can slowly disappear.

For anyone else who does not speak Aussie, a pokie is a video poker or slot machine.

"Pokey" in old slang meant a jail cell. "Throw you into the pokey"

a pokie is a video poker or slot machine

Ah! You mean a, "fruit machine"?

I believe he was talking about one-armed bandits.

The tradie’s laptop

I live in Western Australia. We don’t allow pokies outside the casino (well, actually, they aren’t technically pokies, due to some completely immaterial detail, but they look, smell, and quack like the duck). Going to the Eastern States is always such a shock. In fact I am writing this from a plane from Melbourne to Sydney, two capital cities that are utterly gripped by pokies everywhere in a way that I’m just not used to. I really hope that your State governments get their act together, which they actually seem to be doing, maybe.

We are of course plagued by sports betting in WA, just like everywhere else. I was disappointed to see the US loosen up around this. I expect the typical American didn’t know the complex sports betting industry that was ready to pounce on such a lucrative market. Given how many societal problems the US had as it was, I can’t only imagine that sports betting has cranked them up.

Remember people: supply reduction DOES work, sometimes. Certainly here.

It was such a terrible and unnecessary idea.

I know real people and communities are being hurt by this but what really broke my heart was watching baseball, where they've banned all time great players for life over very small or unproven gambling offenses, be turned into a fancy roulette wheel for cell phone casinos.

I grew up watching baseball, but now I watch these broadcasts and think "how could I let a kid watch these announcers talk about money lines and parlays ad nauseum?" That's a sad thought.

> We are of course plagued by sports betting in WA, just like everywhere else.

Oh really? I thought Western Australia was much stricter about allowing Northern Territory-registered bookmakers to operate in their state.

> Remember people: supply reduction DOES work, sometimes. Certainly here.

Thank you for this reminder.

I live in Australia too and I think the government letting pretty much any company that wants a wagering license have one is problematic.

I'm sure there were problem gamblers 30 years ago when TAB was the only player but it feels like these days there's a new player entering the market every month, and they're getting increasingly desperate to make a profit in what is already a flooded market.

What is the tax the government is levying on these machines? I presume this is a case of “follow the money”.

Oh I was talking about sports betting but I used to work in a venue with poker machines and I was told the government tax was barely anything (like a tiny tiny fraction of what the venue earned in a year).

It was recently increased to and there was a huge lobbying effort with many places pretending they will go out of business.

Edit: Depends on business size.

https://www.revenue.nsw.gov.au/taxes-duties-levies-royalties...

The UK has a limit on the number of machines per shop which means the shops just fill the high streets with four machines in each one. It would be preferable to just have places with rows of machines.

The starter tax rate is a clear incentive for every venue to have a little gambling room upstairs. No getting away from your impulses if you like to gamble.

Nice to see they got covid relief too.

So your solution is to grant a monopoly to TAB and Sportsbet, preventing any competition?

Gatekeeping licenses leads to predatory monopolies.

That's why every single physical casino in Australia, which generally receive monopoly licenses, are cesspits of money laundering and gang activity.

Not necessarily, but I don't think the Northern Territory having no apparent limit on bookmaker licenses is a good idea either. That said, I think the tote is not a predatory monopoly because it just takes a percentage (I don't think it's fixed but maybe it's capped) of all bets whereas the fixed odds players need to squeeze every penny because if they're not careful they can lose money, so having 10+ fixed odds bookmakers creates an environment of cut-throat and sometimes dubious behaviour to make money.

Australia is the gambling king of the world, and they're heavy exporters.

Stake, the largest crypto casino in the world, was founded and built in Australia and the new Twitch competitor Kick with looser gambling rules is also built in Australia by the same founders.

Ironically, it's legal to operate an online casino in Australia, but you can't accept Australian customers :)

What if the loss rate on pokies was legally set at 0.5%? Right now they are around 13% (i think?), and that is pure evil.

IMO it should be increased to something like 50% or above so people stop using them altogether.

Yeah, i guess that would work too.

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