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Comment by DrBazza | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely hate that gambling adverts on TV are legal in the UK. I've seen at least one friend's life ruined because of it.

9pm, and it's wall-to-wall.

Ironically, this is around the same time as bans on smoking in pubs, and tobacco advertising became draconian.

But gambling doesn't do any first-order physical harm, so it's all good, right?

Seeing betting firms on the front of football teams' shirts offends me.

> When Tony Blair's Labour government introduced the Gambling Act in 2005, it allowed gambling firms to advertise sports betting, poker and online casinos on TV and radio for the first time.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-64510095

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> Seeing betting firms on the front of football teams' shirts offends me

How are gambling sponsorships/ads not a conflict of interest?

It's a mess. One player with a gambling sponsor on his shirt got caught match fixing. Another got caught betting against his own team - when he wasn't playing.

It's bad for the atmosphere too. There are people in the stands ignoring the match in front of them because they're checking bets on other games on their phone.

Whenever I’m introduce a friend to the JLeague, 90% of the time the first they compliment is the lack of gambling adds. It really is a breath of fresh air. And I believe that if the JLegaue used this point in its international marketing, it would work to get a lot of people tired of gambling ads to want to follow the league.

It’s also unfortunately a problem in niche sports that don’t really have international gambling-ad-free leagues. e.g. If you want to watch professional curling, your options are pretty slim, and they’re gambling sponsored.

The curling community is also pretty small, so even though I’m nowhere near pro-level, I overlap with some of them - would be disappointing if I couldn’t watch the events with curlers from my city/country.

Bans cost money to enforce, while diminishing personal choice and responsibility. Why not spend that money on education instead? I've not had an ad in my home or on my mobile devices for well over a decade, and I've spent exactly zero on additional hardware to make that happen. It takes less than 10 minutes to configure a new device to be completely ad-free. I won't purchase anything that can't be configured to be free of ads, including smart TVs and iPhones. I still watch whatever content I want on my TV via HDMI from a PC. If our governments are going to be involved, their focus should be on teaching people how to do what people like me do. It's not difficult.

I’m fairly pro-market, certainly more than most people. And I’ll agree that bans cost money, but it’s unclear how much for this specific instance. We may also “save” money for taxpayers who avoided sports betting losses because it was never shoved in their face (because the ads are banned).

I would also guess that banning an ad is cheaper than banning something like “dancing in public.” One is easy and affects few people or entities directly (basically the companies that want to advertise their sports betting business and those that can host it), while the other is impossible to truly ban because you’d need an army of police or a high tech surveillance state (which probably still cannot institute a full ban).

How do you prevent yourself or others from seeing banner/commercials around the city? Some cities are full of it. Just because you removed it from your phone or PC, it doesn't mean that there are no people who are affected by it by watching TV or while walking/driving around the city.

I think there’s an argument that behavioral change is much more difficult that just ingesting the information. (And I’m talking about people who want to change, not some nefarious change instituted by someone else or an institution). Think of how many people want to lose weight but struggle. It’s not usually from the lack of education; there are psychological, social, and environmental impediments to change.

I think the “all it takes is the right information” model lacks a nuanced understanding of human behavior.

I also mentioned personal choice and responsibility. If someone doesn't want to change, why should we attempt to force them? It's not likely to have the effect you desire.

I think the "all it takes is a government ban" model lacks a nuanced understanding of human behavior. Cannabis is a prime example.

To be clear, I'm not advocating a solution for all of society's ills. I'm advocating a path toward the goals we all share. That path may be longer and more difficult to traverse, but it's my belief that it'll lead us closer to where we want to go.

>belief that it'll lead us closer to where we want to go.

That just sounds like a hypothesis (ie unfounded conjecture). Meanwhile, the counterclaim at least has a basis in empirical results. We should craft policy based on how people actually behave, not in how we wish they did.

I get that HN skews towards libertarian. My issue is that that the libertarian idea of how people operate is an idealist’s fantasy and not rooted in the real world.

But didn't we not have this problem only a few short years ago?

What changed?

If you watch a football (English premier league) match then you'll see that not only are there gambling ads at the side of the pitch, but the players are running around wearing gambling adverts.

It’s hard to ad block live sports.

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