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Comment by bentt | Hacker News Reader

The fact that ESPN itself has a sports betting app tells you all you need to know about the perversion of sports now that gambling is blessed by the government.

I think I can live with the legalization of sports betting if there are strong restrictions against marketing and advertising. If you want to ruin your life that's your decision, and you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock market. But the way that advertising has its tentacles in our culture now... it's bad.

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It has a terrible potential to corrupt sport. When you can bet a lot of money on how long a college players plays, or how many points they get in a particular game, what's to stop them from having a relative make a bet and they just fake a cramp?

The stock market is heavily regulated. I don't think you should ban sports betting, because like many vices it's easier to control if it is legal. According to Nate Silver, the more you let people make bets on obscure things the more opportunity their is for participants to cheat. So you should probably restrict betting to things no one participant can control (like the score). You also should try to make it difficult for a person to lose too much. You can't stop it, but you could probably make it harder. In the stock market there is a "qualified investor" that is allowed to take much bigger risks. You could make rules to punish betting sites that accept too many bets from destitute addicts. It wouldn't be perfect, but you can have liquor laws without having prohibition.

> It has a terrible potential to corrupt sport

That ship sailed a looping time ago. Sports teams in the US are franchises. Like McDonalds. They exist to make profit. Lots of it.

It has nothing to do with sport.

Nothing to do with sports except for all the time and effort they put into playing games?

I think one of the uglier examples was an NFL team local to me.

They had one of if not the 'worst' season in the last 15 years or so and really didn't care. But a huge part of that was because the way all of the season tickets, merchandise deals, etc etc, didn't matter if the team was any good. Semi-Ironically the economics were explained by a huge fan of them; he appreciated the business savvy.

You should look at how other countries do professional sports.

The teams are not franchises, they can not simply "buy" whatever players they want, etc.

>It has a terrible potential to corrupt sport. When you can bet a lot of money on how long a college players plays, or how many points they get in a particular game, what's to stop them from having a relative make a bet and they just fake a cramp?

Or get assaulted or murdered, internet death pool style? All kinds of really fucked up incentives are created by these legalized betting apps.

I wonder how many people out there would take an assault charge to win a bet. Since there’s a market you could even get investors. Get $10million together, bet it with high odds, take 25% cut, spend 10 years in jail, live out the rest of your life in comfort.

Is any of that illegal besides the assault itself?

Very much so. Even planning it, without carrying it out, would be subject to criminal conspiracy charges. Recruiting people to the scheme (even the investors) would be soliciting a crime. It's illegal to interfere in the outcome of the game once the bet is placed. Finally, once it was proven you rigged it, you'd probably be forced to return the winnings anyway.

I'm sure an actual attorney could come up with even more reasons this is illegal.

Well darn.

Don't give up. You just need more investors to spread the risk :)

Doesn’t conspiracy require an act in furtherance of the crime?

Are you sure that the party who has solicited the crime is not the investors?

What makes it illegal to interfere in the outcome?

I'd think you'ď be VERY hard pressed to bet $10 million dollars, but I don't know that.

Pretend to be 1,000 people, and each sock puppet bets $10k.

Who’s taking the other side of the bet though? No smart bookie will dig themselves in such a hole, it would obviously be fraud and they’d stop accepting bets

One of the massive platforms, like DraftKings. They won't even notice. The point of all this is the effect of making sports betting legal.

Criminal conspiracy. The agreement to commit the crime is the crime. Not the assault. That is another crime.

A predicate action must be taken in order for this to stick. However, this can be literally anything to move down the proposed path of conspiracy. So if you made the plan then downloaded the app, that's criminal conspiracy

Do you think that might be a little extreme? Where is a legal betting app allowing people to bet on that?

At some point there is enough money triggered for a specific outcome of the game.

If hurting someone credibly increases the odds, it's not if but when will people cross the line.

"Revenue in the Online Gambling market is projected to reach US$97.15bn in 2024"

https://www.statista.com/outlook/amo/online-gambling/worldwi...

There is already $97 billion USD/year. Where is the evidence for what you're saying?

You're right. As david_shi also points out, there's so many other less bothersome ways it makes little sense to recourse to violence on online bets.

Looking into it, the vast majority of incidents are the player themselves betting against their team or losing on purpose, the same of ways matches have been fixed since the dawn of betting. Paying someone is just so much easier than fighting them.

While the opportunity for this isn't zero, the reality is that there are safer and more lucrative ways for criminals to make money, especially for those who have the aptitude to pull something like this off.

If you bet a player gets 0 points in a game and then you shoot them in the leg...you've essentially bet on them being shot in the leg!

If you make a bet on a performance and the athlete doesn't show up at all, the bet is voided. Why would you think this is a plausible scenario?

https://helpcentre.sportsbet.com.au/hc/en-us/articles/187169...

https://www.sportsbettingdime.com/guides/how-to/no-contest-b...

Can you show me any time what you're saying has happened?

That's not new, RIP Pete Rose

Oddly enough, several professional sports gamblers were aware of a NBA referee manipulating game from their data analysis, well before the NBA became aware of it.

That was probably 10+ years ago and I suspect data analysis by the leagues is much stronger now. Still an insane line that needs to be walked between the leagues getting revenue from the sportsbooks and gambling not impacting that play.

Tim Donaghy (ref): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Donaghy

I don’t know how much cheating by referees has got to with it. But many years ago I found the NBA to be a foul shooting contest and gave up on it. It is unwatchable.

The modern NBA stinks for reasons far beyond refereeing and cheating. The Donaghy scandal was a "low point" but the game was 5x as watchable then

One participant can control the score in individual sports, like singles tennis or boxing (notorious for rigged matches).

NBA bans Jontay Porter after gambling probe shows he shared information, bet on games.

“Porter took himself out of that game after less than three minutes, claiming illness, none of his stats meeting the totals set in the parlay. The $80,000 bet was frozen and not paid out, the league said, and the NBA started an investigation not long afterward.”

https://apnews.com/article/nba-jontay-porter-banned-265ad5cb...

It seems crazy that he would risk his career over a bet considering that his regular player salary was so much higher than $80K.

People who cheat often don't consider scenarios where they get caught.

It gets bad enough and I’ll offer odds on who’s throwing, how long until they are busted, and how severe the consequences.

It’s only “potential” insofar as bad behaviour may or may not be exposed sooner or later. I think it’s more useful to understand betting’s impact as a constant corrosive effect. Betting poisons the incentives

Clearly, it's going to happen anyway at least some of the time, but the "what's to stop" is pretty obviously getting caught. It's already happened in at least three instances from the past year I can think of, though I don't remember the names because they were all pretty small-time players (Jontay Porter, who was already mentioned, is one of them). Anyone that is caught doing it gets instantly banned from the sport for life, which hopefully provides an even larger counterincentive compared to whatever incentive there is to attempt throwing a game.

It's not perfect, but the leagues don't have much of a choice. The US Supreme Court ruled that banning sports betting was unconstitutional, so until the court rolls over to new justices with new opinions on the matter in a few decades, it isn't going anywhere. It doesn't make any difference how much some fans on the Internet don't like it. Federal lawmakers can't ban it.

The BBC have a podcast called Sports Strangest Crimes. The most recent series was about Moses Sawbu who was match fixing in the lower leagues. Worth listening to it

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0jv3zvy

I'm surprised that people seem to just now realize that sports betting is a bad idea. As you said, the worst aspect is the large amount of marketing and advertising these platforms receive; I wouldn't care if they weren't pushed so heavily.

People have known for years - that’s the really terrifying part. Heck, when I was in business school I wrote a paper on the dangers of sports betting. There were many resources available then…and heck, Gmail invites were a rare commodity when I was in school.

Edit - I just found a printed copy of the paper - I wrote it so long ago that the term 'sociopathic compulsive consumer' was being used. At the time, I found a lot of evidence of casinos using terms like 'instant gratification' in their marketing commmunications. This is over two decades ago. Heck, the actual paper is on a 3.5 inch floppy.

I was briefly involved with a major sports & esports betting company. It was way grosser than I ever imagined, and they had multiple astroturf campaigns working on legalizing betting in more places.

Took me from a generally laissez-faire attitude about gambling, to being entirely on board with simply outlawing at least that sector of it. So very nasty.

(Incidentally, this did answer a question for me: “how did esports get so big so fast, financially?”. Never made much sense to me. The money’s in gambling, and it’s a fucking lot of money. Lightbulb went on and I felt dumb for not realizing it sooner)

I'm completely with you, my friend. I was in business school when I studied betting. All the stereotypes of business students are true - I could have suggested putting thalidomide into lollipops and nobody would have batted an eye.

Despite that, my class had a serious problem with legalized gambling. One of the most free market absolutists I have ever met even concluded that gambling should just be outlawed. He was (and I believe still is) completely in favour of all drugs being legalized, but legalized gambling bothered him in a way that legalized crack cocaine never could have. What pushed him over was how they fund legalization campaigns with all these promises for help for addicts - they'll usually even offer to put a portion of total book into rehabilitation. And then as soon as it is legalized, they will specifically target people who could become addicted.

Oh, no, are you serious? I thought esports was fun, maybe a little silly. It's the gambling? That's the big lift? Argh.

It’s where a ton of the money in the overall sector comes from, and why a lot of the viewers are watching. There’s a large audience that wants anything to gamble on, and gaming’s very convenient for streaming and stats-collection and such, plus it has frequent matches. There are sponsorships and all that, but I doubt those would be as big as they are without the gambling, either (the audience would decline significantly). Lots of the tournaments are funded wholly or in part by gambling.

I had a long-haul flight last year and was sat next to a gentleman who worked for one of those betting companies in Europe who I had a chat with during the flight. The guy exuded pure sliminess from the minute he explained his job, and I couldn't believe the kinda crap he was proud of peddling to people.

It's a good grift unfortunately, an insane amount of money is involved in it as is usually the case with these sorts of morally bankrupt endeavors.

Before it was legal, most people's experiences with sports betting were small wagers between friends. Maybe a few large bets that they'll still talk about to this day. Gambling with friends or even just coworkers comes with natural limits: the size of one's bets is limited by others' aversions to risk, compulsive gambling is easily spotted, and the players' winnings/losings are zero sum.

Yes, there were illegal bookies before legalization, and they had all the problems of legalized gambling plus more. But the law-abiding (or at least casually law-breaking) majority of voters didn't think increasing the prevalence of sports gambling would hurt. Not too mention all the revenue promises (more benefits, cuts to other taxes). It's no surprise legalization was politically popular.

Yeah, making a small "fun" bet on a game is a way to make it more interesting. I've done it a few times and it really does. I'm talking maybe $20 though, I am far too frugal to put any real money at risk on a bet. I don't go to casinos for the same reason, I'd play a few hands or put maybe $20 into a slot machine and then I'd really start thinking about how I'm flushing my money down the toilet and I'd stop having fun.

My mother in law loves it, she will go to the casino and come home up $1,000 or down $1,000 and it's all just entertainment to her. She loses probably a steady 5% on average, which is exactly what the casinos want.

no... if she's losing a steady 5% of $1000 bucks, she's paying 50 dollars to the casino. That's not enough for the casinos... her room costs more. The casinos want her to spending a lot more money. That's the really big problem of gambling... most people can do it in a relatively healthy way. But problem gamblers make the house most of their money. The house is strongly encouraged to find the problem gamblers and focus on keeping them.

I haven't been to Vegas but I was shocked to learn that the minimum bet at blackjack tables is like $50-100. Too rich for me

Get off the Strip. In Fremont you can play $10 tables. Most casinos even on the Strip you can play $25 (not saying this is good) but the $50-100 minimums are usually reserved for Friday and Saturday nights.

This. There’s plenty of things in society that are similarly bad, legal, but have restrictions on how you can sell them. There’s nothing inherently different about sports betting than options trading on a brokerage platform. But only one of them is advertised in every commercial break during a sports event.

Options are genius trading instruments. A sports wager doesn't even deserve a comparison.

Now apply that same kind of thinking to legalized prostitution and human trafficking.

I'm far from an expert in the issue, but I think that most people that support the legalization of prostitution don't support the legalization of human trafficking.

i think in both cases regulation is the key. for gambling there could be max $ per bet/month/year and for SW more testing and background checks to blacklist bad actors

Okay!

> worst aspect is the large amount of marketing and advertising these platforms receive

Virtually no one is advertising prostitution or human trafficking — certainly not to the degree that gambling is being advertised.

By extension, it seems we can agree prostitution and human trafficking are not nearly as severe a problem as gambling.

That's a really bad example because prostitution by itself is victimless crime. In fact, it's perfectly legal when money doesn't change hands! With gambling you have a winner and a loser, so all the other issues end up downstream necessarily whereas human trafficking (and other issues with sex work) is an enabling tool for criminals running prostitution operations.

The weirdest thing is that (paid) prostitution is completely legal as long as there's a camera involved and you distribute the recording.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Those who do learn from history learn that we never learn from history.

I always phrased it as "Those who learn from history are doomed to watch others repeat it." :)

I lived in Australia for quite a while. It's a terrible example of what can happen. There was recently a very good BBC article on it and the connection between sports, gambling, and marketing: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2yg3k82y0o

Similar to many other toxic things, once the genie is out of the bottle and the government gets used to the revenue it generates, there is a large disincentive to tackling the problem.

For the government, it probably doesn't generate net revenue, because the government has to pick up a lot of the bill for gambling problems. Lobbying corruption, though, is another matter.

Gambling is the only way for some of us to make Sportsball interesting, and attempt to fit in with the absurdist normie culture in which we live.

Realistically, there's nothing particularly interesting about the Dallas Frackers versus the Washington Rentseekers. But if you have money on the outcome, watching a game (with a sufficient supply of alcohol) is actually bearable.

Edit: I'm explaining a real, actual reason for the value of sports betting for some people, but it seems that the Sportsball enthusiasts don't like desecration of their Holy Church. I apologize.

If you loathe sports that much why are you forcing yourself to watch them? "Fitting into absurdist normie culture" is ludicrous. Are you not capable of making friends without drunkenly feigning interest in their hobbies?

Short answer: No, I'm not. People are generally extremely intolerant of others who deviate slightly from the norm. Having friends is a fun fantasy, though.

You might invest some of that money into therapy instead, then.

It's perfectly possible to find friends who aren't into "sportsball", but it takes more than paying an entry fee so you're allowed to hang.

I don't watch sports and have plenty of friends. This sounds firmly like a you problem, I'm afraid.

Out of my entire friendgroup there's perhaps 2 people that are into any sports at all to the level of regularly watching it.

I think what you need is to see a therapist and to rethink your position in life a bit, because it seems very misanthropic without being based on reality. I'd wager that most people don't care about sports all that much, at least anecdotally.

> People are generally extremely intolerant of others who deviate slightly from the norm.

I strongly disagree with this.

A lot of us in the furry fandom have friends who are not furry. You would not believe the number of "normal" people who have seen pictures of my fursuit and thought it was cool. Everyone in my bible study thinks furry conventions look like fun but they would never attend a convention themselves.

And if your difference is not with identity or hobbies, significant number of our group are neurodivergent and/or LGBTQ+(whatever the acronym is today).

Despite what's happening currently, US culture has gotten less uptight about these things in the last three decades. With the internet people have a lot more exposure to things they wouldn't have seen before. And I believe, more accepting as a result.

Finding a friend can be difficult, but with the internet it is not impossible.

> I'm explaining a real, actual reason for the value of sports betting for some people, but it seems that the Sportsball enthusiasts don't like desecration of their Holy Church. I apologize.

Seems more like you are seething.

Why do you bother even watching it at this point? I think I watched exactly one soccer game in last 5 years (it was a final of something big, can't remember now), there are a lot of other interesting activities in life.

That is the most insufferable comment I've read all year.

Pure gold.

Holy hell you stepped on a nerve. I appreciate the perspective though, I've attended sportsball matches with friends and a couple bucks on the outcome would likely have made it more engaging.

> you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock market.

I can't tell if you are promoting the stock market as a better or worse alternative to gambling?

If you meant the latter, you couldn't be further from the truth. The stock market, as a whole, represents the combined productivity of all the publicly traded firms in the country. Day to day, the stock market is unpredictably volatile. But over the long term (decades), it trends upward and by a large amount. There is no safer investment with the same kinds of returns and there is lots of research to prove it.

But short-term speculation and individual stock picking is much more akin to gambling.

I meant more like stock picking, day trading, etc. I don't think there are too many gambling addicts that would choose a whole market Vanguard ETF over, say, TSLA. :)

Similarly as Lewis Black likes to point out, we're one of only 2 countries that advertises drugs to ourselves.

... What's the other one?

Ibuprofen, paracetamol etc is advertised in the uk.

Policy towards pathological gambling, along with drugs, is an interesting and deep philosophical hole: To what extent do those things represent a kind of biochemical slavery, and if one cares about freedom/autonomy, should that mean letting people enslave themselves, or does it mean blocking them in the name of more freedom/autonomy overall?

>you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock market.

There's a big difference between betting on sports (zero sum) and buying stocks (ownership in a company), even if the latter can be silly at times.

The gambling addicts who get their fix from the stock market are mostly not buying stocks. They're mostly buying puts and calls, which are much closer to bets (you win big or you lose it all), and much closer to zero-sum (either you or the guy you bought it from loses). If they are just buying straight stocks, it's either a meme stock like GME or multiple-leveraged.

AFAIK there are generally basic restrictions on being able to engage in options trading and I don't think the platforms are trying to encourage you to make more options trades in the same way gambling companies do. It's also highly regulated

As I said in the last discussion about this [1], I think outright banning just leads to worse outcomes, so you need to find a medium where you can minimize the abuse while still allowing people to get their hit enough to not go seek out unregulated forms.

I'm not fond of it either, but I don't have a better answer that doesn't seem like it's going to lead to worse outcomes.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41667521

It's worse than bad, I have seen betting ads and placement in content that regular advertisers would not touch with a 10 feet pole, e.g. in pirated broadcasts

Most gamblers are casuals. I spend $5-10 a week during football and usually am down like $10 at the end of the year. It provides a lot of entertainment, sucks that some people can’t control themselves but I shouldn’t be punished for that.

Agree that heavily regulating and perhaps banning advertising needs to be done.

> Most gamblers are casuals. I spend $5-10 a week during football and usually am down like $10 at the end of the year

An annual cap of $500 on bets per social security number seems reasonable. At the very least, 10% of state's median income (a whopping $4,222 nationally [1]).

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N

I think a proportion of income would work better, because $500 would be a lot for some people.

> a proportion of income would work better, because $500 would be a lot for some people

Sure, if a state is willing to enforce that added complexity. I'd still have a hard cap to remove plausible deniability. Otherwise every trailer-park resident will be a millionaire while FanDuel et al do a Facebook-can't-tell-if-I'm-12-or-52 shrug.

$500 per year? I know people who put a grand on FCS football on Fridays

I don't gamble outside of a few small wagers during March Madness. Having said that, I have a viscerally negative reaction to your proposal. It feels paternalistic to the point of near Puritanism. I don't want a laissez-faire free-for-all out there, I'm not saying "everything is fine as-is", but a government capped limit on how you waste your own money when the terms and odds are clearly communicated (unlike traditional scams, for instance)? I'll pass on that, and I'm confident I'm more of a "big government" proponent than most commenters in this community.

At a minimum I do think the government should limit advertising and crack down on incentives these sites gives to keep people hooked.

They should be subject to KYC just like banks.

That argument can be made for and against anything (substance abuse comes to mind) which has consequences for society at large.

Agreed. I've never been into sports and never watched more than a few minutes of any game. But for a few years I was in a small stakes weekly football pool and it made weekends really fun. Suddenly, I wanted to know if the Rams or the Dolphins won, and by how much. I was tracking the pool leader boards. I ended up being ahead about $20. That pool ended, and I never joined another one. But it was a mildly fun time.

There are two possible outcomes:

1) I, a person who gambles neither casually nor as part of an addiction, will pay for gambling addicts; or 2) You will be punished in the form of your degeneracy becoming illegal.

I’m not sure why you should be the one to get the free pass here.

the government's goal should be to protect the population not to be fair to one person who enjoys the odd $5 bet.

Are we banning cars then? What about unhealthy food? Heart disease is the number one killer in this country so if the gov wanted to protect people it would make sure everyone was skinny.

You're presenting a false dichotomy. Cars are a form of transport which has obvious benefits. Even unhealthy foods are food which is y'know the thing people consume to live.

What are the benefits to keeping gambling? Does the entertainment value offset the societal harms?

> Does the entertainment value offset the societal harms?

yes. Just like the entertainment value of unhealthy food outweighs the social harms it creates.

I went to a local team baseball game and it was frankly depressing.

To see someone being put on the big screen to make some guess in a future inning with a plug for a bet site at a baseball game; frankly at this point just allow steroids again if you're selling out that bad.

>just allow steroids again if you're selling out that bad.

As I understand, they basically do. HGH, TRT, and other stuff is used for quicker recovery and to slow effects of aging.

Hot take: all advertising for any kind of gambling should be banned, and online gambling should be outright prohibited

The challenge is defining gambling, no? I agree with you, it's easy to determine all of the nasty gambling now. But by the time you know it's gambling as in addiction versus gambling as in a flawed but interesting part of a game, it's too late.

> But the way that advertising has its tentacles in our culture now... it's bad.

Yes. But half of HN works in the advertising industry.

"perversion of sports" is a particularly American viewpoint, I think! The latent streak of puritanism, maybe. Yet, somehow, the NCAA (which is wage theft on a truly industrial scale) is morally okay. It's weird.

(The intersection with US ad culture – for existence, drug ads on TV – is maybe also unique.)

Sport has, as a business, always been random number generation for gambling purposes. Some, like horseracing, have basically no other point. Gambling is going to happen, and like weed, it's probably better that it's regulated and taxed than entirely underground. There's no more gambling content now than there was fantasy football content before, and fantasy football was gambling too.

If we're looking for a perversion of sports, though, how about the NCAA's industrial-scale wage theft? US professional sports should have junior systems which pay the players like the rest of the world...

NCAA players are now being paid for what its worth

The NIL loophole? Yeah, not really, and not enforceably, and examples of teams reneging are not hard to find.

Not NIL. lawsuit in court right now is reaching a settlement to directly pay players.

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/24/nx-s1-4978680/house-ncaa-sett...

22% of revenue, not employees, colleges don't accept employer liability. This settlement should be rejected as unconscionable.

Public universities (and private universities which actually care about education!) would be well advised to get out of the business of running professional sports teams, I think.

Big universities make way too much money from sports to ever get out of the business. Not only direct revenue but also alumni and sponsor donations.

The university sector (both public and private) is a mess and this is one of the many, many ways in which that is true.

Being compensated in kind with housing, food, and education (not to mention significant "grants" from boosters clubs and brand deals) is not the same as wage theft and it is verbal slight of hand to suggest otherwise.

That only applies to scholarship athletes. Walk-ons get no such benefits. They're working for free while their school is pulling in $60+ million a year in TV money to watch them play and the head coach is making 7 figures

If the players aren't employed by their teams, provided with healthcare and pensions and all the rest, then it absolutely is. The NCAA (for revenue sports) is a scam and everyone involved with any of it is morally bankrupt.

>If the players aren't employed by their teams, provided with healthcare and pensions and all the rest, then it absolutely is.

Why? They are being paid, fed, housed, and educated in exchange for playing sports at nearly the highest level. Where is the injustice? They live lives of opulence and leisure that kings of previous ages could not even dream of.

Funnily enough... considering how healthcare in the US is tied to employment, then professional athletes of any age should be covered for it by their employer.

People who do pro sports are constantly pushing their bodies to the very limit of what they can do. With those constraints, accidents and overruns are much more likely to cause extended damage.

College athletes get healthcare. They have team doctors and trainers, and for general healthcare if they aren't covered by their parents' insurance they will have insurance through the school (required) which will be paid out of their athletic scholarship. I don't know of any major university that would permit a residential student to not have health insurance coverage.

They aren't being educated.

Outside of Stamford and the Ivies, I'd wager that most players, especially in football, are taking easy classes (and in some cases having tests taken for them) and even then, things are quite easy for them. They aren't taking physics, economics, etc.. that actually prepare students for the real world. There's not enough time for that.

I saw it for myself at a big D1 football program. You think at a school like Texas or Alabama, a school that worships football above all else, would let their athletes be preoccupied with school? Come on now.

Elite football and basketball athletes at major programs are tiny, tiny minority of all student athletes in this country. I went to a decent regional state school (DII at the time) and I had advanced economics and math classes with a number of athletes, including football players. It's just not correct to generalize from the programs that are NFL feeder programs.

Fair, but NFL feeder programs are not educating their athletes, including a number of athletes who will not make the NFL or NBA. They are getting little to no education and have no shot at turning pro.

Worse yet, the chase for more and more football money has screwed over regional conferences, which harms the run-of-the-mill student athlete in non-revenue sports (think track, swimming, tennis, etc) who has no pro aspirations. Why the hell is Stamford, a school on the west coast, in the Atlantic Coast Conference?

I definitely agree with your second statement about football ruining the conferences for all the other sports. I don't think it's sustainable and I think within 10 years we'll see a correction, where football largely dissociates from the rest of the regional conference model.

To your first point, though, whether an individual student athlete avails themselves of the free education being offered to them is kind of up to them. I know multiple athletes who played at elite programs who managed to get educated just fine. I suspect the ones who aren't getting educated would be no better off, or worse off, if they didn't attend college at all.

> The latent streak of puritanism, maybe

The main problem is that addiction kind of goes around people's interests and their better judgement.

Normally I agree, we don't need to be making 'moral' decisions for people. If they want to do something 'sinful' - like gambling - have at it.

But the people who promote gambling have lots of money. And gambling is basically smoking. So, it gets hairy. They can lie, they can cheat, and they can manipulate people's minds, tricking them into doing something bad for them. And then the addiction does the rest.

Absolutely addiction does; so we're going to ban alcohol (and weed), and then maybe move onto video games and books and and and and?

Prohibition has generally been a lot less effective than regulation. The problem in the US, in my view, is much more the utterly-gutted effectiveness of the regulatory state than it is the existence of legal gambling.

There's a big slippery slope here.

Who says we need to keep going? That's not a hypothetical question - who says? Why would we do that?

I agree regulation is good, but prohibition is a type of regulation. There're also levels of prohibition - you don't need to prohibit all of it, maybe just the most obviously harmful.

Like you can ban online gambling but keep casinos if you want. I don't know, I don't have the analysis on which is worse.

Fine, but then the US has spent a terrifying amount of my money on sports and I want it all back if the point of their sophisticated pro-social spending (which strangely has to include private ventures getting handouts) is actually to extract wealth from the poor and the weak.

>Who says we need to keep going? That's not a hypothetical question - who says? Why would we do that?

Why wouldn't we? If we're legally precluding people from hobbies that could harm them, there's always going to be a worst legal one.

There's an ugliest painting in most galleries, but that doesn't mean we ban them. If the worst legal hobby is beneficial, why would anyone want to ban it? At some point before that, a threshold will be reached where people feel that the harms of a ban outweigh the harms of the practice. I really don't see how this slope is slippery.

Because we're reasonable humans and capable of saying "if that's the worst, we're fine"?

So then you must have a clear set of principles on how to regulate gambling to maintain it as a healthy activity with no degenerate pathways?

Sure, like we already do for other addictive industries like Tobacco and Alcohol. It doesn't have to be perfect because it's hard reduction - if half as many people get addicted that's still a big win.

If alcohol and tobacco were discovered tomorrow, they'd probably end up schedule 1, and rightly so. If cannabis was discovered tomorrow, it would probably be unscheduled, and rightly so.

We literally have a system of tiers of addiction versus potential value for addictive substances. A slippery slope argument is pretty silly when we literally already created a staircase.

> Sport has, as a business, always been random number generation for gambling purposes

I personally don't care about the business of sports. Most sports were just ways for children to get exercise and everything that came after it was a perversion. Fat men sitting on couches watching other grown men throw a football around isn't much better than those same men gambling on it.

> Yet, somehow, the NCAA (which is wage theft on a truly industrial scale) is morally okay. It's weird.

Outside of top men's basketball and football programs, there is no real wage theft occurring. These minor sports are avocations for student athletes, and not businesses for the universities.

Outside of the places where money is being made, money is not being made.

Edit: but even when money is being made, the athletes don't get it.

I'm trying to frame the problem--not say there isn't a problem. Athletes is too broad a term. You're engaging in tautologies.

Sorry it sounded like you were saying there isn't a problem because you said

> there is no real wage theft occurring

I know you qualified it with

> Outside of top men's basketball and football programs

But that was my point. Where no one's making money, no one's making money.

No, but many of them are getting a free or discounted education. Is that not something of value?

It's non-zero value, but we can't say it's the market-clearing price for their services. And anecdotally the quality of that education is compromised.

Student-athletes in the serious football and basketball programs spend a lot of their time at practice. During the season, travel to away games eats up much of their free time. They're "encouraged" to take only easy courses. There are reports of grading corruption so their GPA is high enough to remain eligible to play.

They still get admission to a university with lowered standards and a credential at the end of the day. A lot of these scholarship athletes aren't college material and wouldn't get in otherwise. There's some value there.

It's kind of like rich kids who are bad students paying for admission into elite schools. Obviously there's value, otherwise they wouldn't have their parents pay for it.

Like I said it's non-zero value. But is it more value than a fair wage, negotiated without artificial restrictions? Why can't they grant the athletes admission and give them the option of either studying tuition-free, or pay tuition but earn a salary for playing?

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