Should Sports Betting Be Banned?
maximum-progress.com
maximum-progress.com
Gambling is poison to both the individual and the sport. Gambling addiction is absolutely devastating. Gambling has the highest rate of suicide of any addiction [1]. Being able to gamble on your phone is way too accessible. Gambling of any sort is an awful industry but at least a physical casino has a higher barrier to entry than pulling your phone out.
Here's something else you may not know: if you win too much on these sports betting sites, you can get banned [2].
Now, you might be tempted to say "casinos ban card counters in Blackjack", which is true. But sports betting is more like poker where the house takes a cut of any action, so by winning you're taking money from other players, not the house.
So why do sportsbooks ban you for winning? Because it means other people lose and to create addiction you can't always lose. You have to sometimes win.
For me, this absolutely destroys any argument that it is a "game of skill" (which matters for the legislation that legalized it).
[1]: https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/problem-gambl...
[2]: https://www.elitepickz.com/blog/do-sportsbooks-ban-winners-a...
I would suggest restricting the aboslute crap out of it. make it really hard to get into.
Sports gambling was prohibited in most US states during most of US history. It didn't "work" in the sense that it did not completely prevent sports gambling, but neither did it cause any major problems AFAICT.
I would argue, you still havent seen the end of THAT effect. the money talks for a long time.
Certainly everyone will agree with me that the mafia is a pale shadow of what it was on the East Coast of the US in the 1960s and 1970s? And do any of the non-mafia criminal gangs in the US even offer sports betting as a service? Sports betting is still illegal in many US states, including California: does anyone know of any gang offering sports betting to Californians?
I've spent many hours on Youtube learning about the mafia, which gave me the distinct impression that the worst effects of the mafia are when it "taxes" necessary society functions (like garbage collection and skyscraper construction) and that the mafia's offering services that are unequivocally illegal are less harmful. Certainly it was outright illegal for any party to offer betting of very-high-interest loans when I was growing up.
So, without someone's proving a decent amount of evidence to the contrary, I'm going to believe tentatively that "driving sports betting underground" does not in fact has a high societal cost. The mafia's making some regular money on this or that is not necessarily an unacceptable societal cost; the optimal amount of crime is not zero.
Gambling advertisements on the other hand, learn from Australia. Don't let it happen.
2. Gambling has massive harms on others. The family of the men who gamble (it’s usually men gambling on sports), including the minor kids who cannot leave the individual and are dependent on them, as well as broader society which now has to pick up the pieces for this individual and the people dependent on him.
Why isn't the censor led astray?
As someone mentioned men are more likely to gamble, I'm sure (but don't quote me on this) that ADHD is over represented as well.
If you broadcast an ad to 10 million people and 1k gets hooked it's still 1k too many lives ruined, while being an annoyance to the other ~10 million
It's not about moderators being harmed or not. It's a preference of the wider community to not have the harmful content, and the moderators volunteering to help keep it that way.
With most harmful content, the effect of seeing a single instance is not significant. Being exposed to it constantly in places you frequent for other reason (your online communities, or advertisements everwhere), builds up much more of an effect. Now moderators being constantly exposed might also be affected, but they're choosing to do so, and may have coping strategies in place for the more extreme cases.
I've lived long enough to see certain kinds of content banned, and then embraced, and then a different kind of content be banned.
Which era is correct in their choice of banning?
I think a good parallel here is Tobacco advertising. Smoking is harmful in every way, therefore I don't see any reason why advertising it to a broad audience (which will inadvertently also include children) is something we should allow.
What's the net benefit of allowing such advertising? I don't see it. Yo could argue something about rights to free speech or some variation, but societies still have a responsibility to look out for the health of their people, no?
As for adults, I am an amateur historian. History is jam packed with censorship of things those in power have deemed "harmful". Examples:
1. William Tyndale was burned at the stake for translating the Bible to English.
2. Galileo was put under house arrest for his heliocentric views.
3. Mae West was sentenced to 10 days in jail for her play "Sex".
4. Boris Pasternak's novels were banned in the Soviet Union.
5. TV shows in the 1970s were not allowed to show toilets in the bathrooms.
6. Homosexuality could not be portrayed in films until the 1960s.
7. Howard Stern was fined $2.5m for "indecent" broadcasts.
8. Violence on film is far, far more graphic today than was allowed just a few years ago.
9. You can say "fuck" on TV today, along with nudity.
And on and on it goes. Those censors were just as convinced as you are that they were doing the right thing.
“Legalize everything I can do to myself” is a wildly toxic and uneducated message that completely ignores all the knowledge we have accumulated about the weaknesses and loopholes of human nature.
He's got 3 kids (duh) so it immediately affects 4 people while straining even more, for what gain? Megaprofits for $megagamblingcorp?
I could see the way to argue for banning advertising being along the lines of minimizing harm. You acknowledge that gambling does hurt gamblers but also people close to them and society more broadly, but that prohibition may not be very effective so you permit regulated legal gambling (but no ads). I just don't really see how you can make it a freedom argument.
And why aren't gambling advertisements "part of a free society"?
I'm all for being skeptical of the government and its (ab)use of power, but I must admit I struggle to find a good excuse to not ban gambling past "people should be allowed to ruin their own lives".
* Gambling won't disappear completely, but will move underground (creating mafias), or at least people will gamble online illegally (depriving country of tax revenue)
* Not every gambling leads to ruin, just like alcohol drinking is not always alcoholism. At policing the way people have fun is indeed a complex issue.
* There are forms of gambling that can't be regulated easily. One (unfortunately) form of gambling common recently is making insane bets in the stock market (see WallStreetBets subreddit, for example). It's even tax advantaged, compared to regular gambling.
* Making gambling illegal may make it harder for gambling addicts to find the help they need.
The idea that we ban things for the public good is laughable.
If you’re taking a libertarian, its part of a free society therefore we are helpless and must allow it view, then banning the speech around it completely contradicts this view.
How do you square the harm that gambling does to unrelated parties?
It's really easy to lose a lot of money super fast with gambling such that suddenly your entire family is dire straits (losing the house, facing bankruptcy, etc.) before the non-gamblers have any ability to react.
I’ve wondered if it could be possible to harness some of these "suboptimal" gambling behaviors into "socially good" gambling but I haven’t quite figured out how to do it. Maybe someone else here can do it.
If you banned everything that some percent of the population could use to harm themselves, you might be disappointed by what's left.
It sounds ridiculous, but so does blowing lots of money on sports betting.
Given that the use of violence is a rather extreme remedy to a perceived problem, there'd have to be a pretty compelling case to warrant pulling out a gun to stop people from doing something.
That's what government bans are.
Except for the 300 layers of asking nicely, , formally giving warnings, issuing fines and citations, etc., yeah it basically is just guns threats violence and totalitarianism.
Legalizing Sports Gambling Was a Mistake https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41659458
I have a few ideas. Criminal groups are often broken by having a police infiltrate the group and collect the evidence. We could have police officers joining the gambling groups (the groups need to accept some people, so they have someone they can make bets with) and catching the perpetrators. I also don't think that - at least right now - gamblers use tor or sufficiently anonymous proxies, so it would be easy to get most of them by just observing network traffic. Also, significant money transfers between random private people are uncommon. You can find sets of people who often do transfers like this, and find the "gambler networks".
Gambling on many other things e.g elections, crime rates, ceo performance, etc should be allowed because predictions there are socially valuable.
1: https://commonwealthbeacon.org/by-the-numbers/poll-indicates...