Colleges face gambling addiction among students as sports betting spreads | Hacker News Reader

Colleges face gambling addiction among students as sports betting spreads

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50 pointsrntn50 comments

    More than US$268 billion has been gambled legally on sports betting between June 2018 and November 2023.

    Revenue in all U.S. gaming sectors has increased significantly, with sports betting growing the fastest, at an estimated 75% annually.

    It has generated about $3.9 billion in tax revenue to date.

Here's your problem areas - it's pretty easy to defend their freedoms to bet and screw the little people over when there are wheelbarrow loads of cash to dump on any problems like senators with ethics up for a bid, news corps that need a side to take, etc.

The questions I'd be interested in seeing ansers to are:

* Who are the sports betting companies, what are their ownerships? (Is this the Australians, is it the Saudi's, surely it's not the post millennial Mafia out of Vegas still)

* Who are they lobbying?

* Where are they incorporated (Delaware?)

* Where are they really based (not on paper).

Addiction mechanics are key to structuring stratified societies. Alcohol, illegal drugs (which fuel abnormal profits, violence and corruption), gambling, dopamine traps in "social" media.

It's the oldest game in town. The only game in town. The ability to delay gratification in turn is the biggest single predictor of rising income.

In addition to you: Why does not the phenomenon occur anywhere else? (or does it?)

From what I read it's also a problem in the UK: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-64510095

I guess the gambling companies know that their ads work, luring people with the idea of getting rich quick.

Just look at the crypto-boom or reddit WSB..

Some readers might be surprised to hear that in Austria, sports betting is legally not a form of gambling but a "game of skill".

I only know a handful of people who care for it, almost no-one at university did it and the only people I do know who did it were so obscenely good at it that they quit their jobs to pursue it full-time. (to alarming success - their algorithms earned more in a year than I would earn working full-time for 2 years)

The permissible and legal nature doesn't seem to hurt my country like it's hurting yours, make of this info what you will.

In the US, “daily fantasy” games were legal before general sports gambling because they were argued to be games of skill. In daily fantasy, you pick players you expect to do well that day and enter the line up into a pool of opponents with tiered payouts based on your rank at the end of the day. It’s different from betting money lines but I’m not sure it’s that different.

At the same time, poker, which has a very clear skill component (I’d lose my shirt if I sat down at a table against World Series winners) is gambling.

the problem is often exacerbated by the "legal and safe" regulated gambling companies themselves - breaking advertising rules, codes of conducts, and so much more..

Gambling industry fines (levied by regulators) so far this year have reached an astounding $427,183,860 (https://gamblingindustryfines.com/)

also sadly, many states don´t have any support for problem gambling.

I remember some of my college friends being mildly addicted to online poker back in the mid-2000s. Is this really a novel phenomenon?

There will always be people who seek it out. When I look at Apple’s App Store, ESPN Bets is the #2 free app. #1 is Temu, which feeds a different kind of addiction to get people to throw their money away.

It’s one thing for it to exist. It’s another for it to be legally above board, front and center where people go to find stuff to do, advertised non-stop, and living in people’s pockets.

These new sites and apps, that can now advertise and operating openly, have thrown gasoline on the fire.

The scale of addiction won’t be remotely comparable. The UK has had completely legal, tax free gambling for a very long time and addiction has become a huge issue, with online poker being a tiny part (barely even features in the discourse) of the story. We’re talking about life destroying levels of addiction.

The barrage of gambling ads seems unprecedented, at least in my neck of the woods.

I’d love to see this grouped by college major as an academic exercise.

It’s been a while since I was in college, but this was a problem then too.

So was alcoholism and overuse of recreational drugs. You can’t just ban away vice.

To an extent you can. Have you used FanDuel, DraftKings, EspnBets? They've only come about in the last couple years after the sports betting ban was lifted.

I'll be honest, I think they're really fun to use and I've been betting more than I ever have. I never would have gone through the trouble of sports betting before they existed. I don't consider it a problem personally, but I can only imagine the problems these apps might cause a lot of people.

I don't gamble but friends were using betting sites in the college library or in class before it was unbanned. Bodog especially comes to mind.

You can get far by banning private profit from other people's vices.

0r at least regulating it, if private profit complains too much.

The goal isn't to eradicate vice, it's to avoid situations where people create misery for others because they stand to profit from it.

You can, but you need a supportive community. Muslim countries have effectively banned alcohol, not only as a legal matter, but in practice. Alcohol or drug use subjects you to shaming and other social consequences. When the community is permissive, the law alone won’t work.

I don't see that as a viable option. I have no interest whatsoever in living in such a repressive culture.

If it works great somewhere else, good, but keep it somewhere else.

My point is don’t say it can’t be done. It can be done, you just choose not to do it.

I think that when someone says "it can't be done" in this context they mean "It can't be done without a tremendous amount of detrimental side effects."

That phraseology only makes sense if you assume the audience agrees with you about what’s “detrimental.” But here, whether the “side effects” are “detrimental” depends on how much you value individual freedom, which is part of the debate.

It’s like saying “we can’t have universal healthcare” because you personally consider the resulting tax burden unacceptable. You’re obfuscating your message by glossing over an underlying value judgment that’s very much subject to debate.

Obviously and that is true literally every time someone uses that sentence. And speaking about obfuscation:

> But here, whether the “side effects” are “detrimental” depends on how much you value individual freedom, which is part of the debate.

And how much you value human rights. And how much you value people not being tortured for this. The way muslim countries do it rely on systematic excessive cruelty and control in many private aspects of life.

Since we are at "we need to spell it out" maybe we should not hide behind soft euphemism like "valuing individual freedom" which suggest something much softer.

> And how much you value human rights.

There is no such thing as “human rights.” If you autopsy someone you won’t find any human rights in there. It’s just a party trick that allows Europeans to insist that their cultural emphasis on individualism is superior to other cultural values.

> And how much you value people not being tortured for this. The way muslim countries do it rely on systematic excessive cruelty

For the most part, it’s aunties chiding you, which is only figurative rather than literal torture.

Then there is not such thing as "other cultural values" either. There is no such thing as morals or ethics. No abstract concept ever exist. And speaking of these, muslim countries are much more picky, demanding much more and mistreating people (especially women) in much higher numbers.

> For the most part, it’s aunties chiding you, which is only figurative rather than literal torture.

Sure, there is a lot of that too. And then, there is the rest of it, like, actual literal torture.

“Human rights” don’t exist not because it’s abstract, but because it’s self-contradictory. “Cultural values” and “rights” can exist with respect to a particular society, or by reference to a particular legal code. But “human rights” implies rights that are universal to humans, and there is no such thing.

“Human rights” is a religious concept that makes sense if you have a God that provides the source of universal values. But presumably we are having a secular discussion here, not a theological one.

That is some nice sophistry, but that is all there is to it. Human rights and cultural values exist or not in the exact same level. If anything what you call "cultural values" are almost purely religious ones as they exist within the context of one faith and the reason for them is religion.

> “Human rights” is a religious concept that makes sense if you have a God that provides the source of universal values.

This is not true. Atheists frequently like and agree with this concept. The rights that we apply to all humans. I dont need god to believe in morals.

“For the most part” is doing some extraordinarily heavy lifting.

Which countries have effectively banned alcohol?

https://www.google.com/search?q=Which%20countries%20have%20e...

I'm more interested in what the user I'm replying to believes on the matter than Google.

Same because people certainly drink in those countries and alcohol is available.

The way Muslim countries do it strikes me as something I 100% do not want at home. Like, I do not want any of it at home.

Social consequences like what exactly?

Everything from aunties throwing shade to diminished marriage prospects (in a country where 90% of marriages are arranged).

You can. I remember the ban on sports betting right after it was initially starting to take off online. It had a massive chilling effect and you had to jump through a lot of hoops to make a bet (VPNs, fake addresses, knowing a bookie in person etc.), so people just didn’t do it. Not just sports betting either, it really put a damper on online casino games like poker, blackjack etc.

Sports betting, or gambling of any form, for that matter, wasn’t a fraction of the problem it is today.

YouTube keeps showing me ads for online casinos even though I have marked Gambling as a "don't show me this" category in my profile. There doesn't not appear to be any straight-forward way to report this to YouTube. Perhaps they find the complaints too inconvenient.

The cynic in me would suggest that by telling YouTube that you don't want to be targeted by gambling ads, you're implicitly telling them that you're more likely to be taken in by gambling ads thus making you more likely to click through and spend money.

wow, that's horrible and predatory. sueball!

If sports betting is becoming prevalent enough, I wonder if we should be educating kids on how it all works. Understanding the odds, the marketing, why it is addictive, how it compares to other types of markets, etc.

Everyone knows how it works. Most people under the age of 21 have also been trained their entire lives to believe that their opinions and instincts are just as valid as anyone else's regardless of how much experience they lack. Go talk to literally anyone teaching students at or under that age. It's frightening how poorly millennials have been raising their kids under the guise of self-esteem-building.

It's going to be absolutely fascinating in another decade or so when there are millions of 30-somethings with insane college debt because they maxed out their loans in an attempt for extra spending money for gambling and other useless shit.

How does this compare with other countries where gambling is more normalised? Is this simply a symptom of opening something up after prohibiting it for so long?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-11-03/online-ga...

A coworker asked me whether he could figure out a way to bet on sports from his house since VPNs are totally blocked. Turns out it's illegal here. Good.

It's only a symptom of greater problems, you can't treat these efficiently without tackling said roots.

Sure, but I think that the industry profiting from gambling addiction is one of the roots. Maybe even the most important one.

The US seems to have tightly regulated gambling of this sort until recently, and it seems to have worked reasonably well. It's a contrast to the UK, where bookmakers have been poverty marker alongside the usual liquor stores and payday lenders for a hundred years.

Everyone’s carrying a tiny jackpot in their pocket computers. Of course it cannot be effectively banned, because the sacred flow of money from the poorer towards the richer can’t be thwarted. Yay

It's curious to blame TikTok when colleges themselves promote sports gambling[1].

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/business/caesars-sports-b...

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