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Comment by nba456_ | Hacker News Reader

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Breaking windows with rocks is lots of fun and creates jobs too, but somehow no one is praising vandals.

The online (and IRL) sports books will severely limit the amount you can bet if you’re a plus-EV bettor.

This take, while correct, ignores the fact that chronic gambling will regularly — and predictably — destroy people's lives by virtue of its addictive qualities. Meaning, if it is legal, then we — as a society — will be negatively impacted as a whole. We all understand that a society is the sum of its people's strengths and weaknesses.

So if this is your take, then you should be perfectly willing to be heavily taxed on all of your bets so that those who can't control themselves can receive prompt and proper care to revert their addiction, and assist their families to recover from the financial ruin caused by forces outside of their control; understanding that an addiction is often uncontrollable without a lot of time and a lot of help.

If you have a problem with that, then you are signaling that you only care about society's strengths, because you are benefiting from them, and not its weaknesses, because you have not felt the gravity of a boot on your neck in awhile. Thus, I believe that your opinion is moot and also in the minority.

"Creating jobs" without creating value is a bad thing.

If you're saying entertainment is not value then there are going to be a lot of things that fall into that category.

Putting a wheel in a rat cage is good for the rat.

Giving the rat a lever to randomly apply cocaine or an electric shock is bad for the rat, even if the rat is addicted to pulling that lever.

Like all gambling it also has disproportionately negative effects on people who are already poor.

It disproportionately affects people who are dumb, not people who are poor. Though the two can be correlated.

I have friends who are extremely smart, but they find gambling addictive and lose control of themselves in a Casio.

Its a genetic issue.

You could end up with children who have the same issue.

I would say that it's proportional to both, even if you factor out correlations.

...that's still bad?

‘Gambling is a tax on people who are bad at math’

Not always in the case of sports betting - although there are definitely math "taxes" like parlays and point buys and heavy chalk. Plus all the predatory "promotion" stuff they will throw out. Sharp bettors do exist though, and do make quite a bit of money. They're less than 1% though.

Yes, always.

There is nothing unique about sports gambling here.

With all due respect, absolutely not? If a book puts out a line of +200 and you've determined there is a certain percentage chance of winning, your expectation easily can be positive. The "gambling is a tax for those bad at math" is a misconstrued quote that usually applies to completely negative expectation games, such as scratcher tickets, in which the more you play you will always lose in the long run. There are very precise mathematical terms for these things, and strictly, you are wrong.

You can extend this to things like poker as well - is that a tax on people bad at math? Of course not, that'd be a stupid argument, because it's not a purely negative expectation game.

>There is nothing unique about sports gambling here.

Sports betting exchanges are unique compared to other traditional gambling options.

Ah yes, gambling. The haven for smart people. /s

Sure, the average gambler is not sophisticated but people who do find edges are generally pretty smart.

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