How did sports betting become legal in the US?
shreyashariharan.substack.com
shreyashariharan.substack.com
These books also market what are the hardest to understand and worst bets to consumers. Think 4 way parlays. Like all 4 legs seem reasonable. They probably on their own each have a 70 pct probability. But that means a 24 pct of hitting. Of course they are all over props because people love to bet over. They are taking advantage of the fact that most people don't understand expected value or odds of multiple independent things happening
I don’t think he was even intending to return things when he bought them. Dude just had high standards.
He now pays with cash.
Famously, for example, James Dolan bans all sorts of people he doesn’t like from Madison Square Garden and any of the other venues he owns. He notoriously bans all lawyers who work for any firm that sues him (which happens a lot). He even uses facial recognition to catch them, and kicks them out without refunding their tickets. People have tried to sue him for this (many of them are lawyers, after all!) and so far no one has won against him for it, so he keeps doing it.
Here is an article about it: https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/45949758/new-york-knicks...
IN 2023 the city threatened them with violating the terms of their liquor license [1] (which doesn't prevent you from refusing service to anybody short of actually illegal behavior). I can't really find any follow-up about this.
[1]: https://nypost.com/2023/12/06/business/msg-could-lose-its-li...
Glasshole 2.0? No Mickey for Meta!
In Colorado, such service refusals are illegal. The civil rights agency prosecutes them and their legal rationale is that historically every "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" has only been used to discriminate against non-white customers.
> Rule 20.4 – Discriminatory Signage in Places of Public Accommodation.
> No person shall post or permit to be posted in any place of public accommodation any sign that states or implies the following:
> “WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE.”
> Such signage implies that management may rely upon unlawful discriminatory factors in determining access to a place of public accommodation and thus is prohibited.
https://www.sos.state.co.us/CCR/GenerateRulePdf.do?ruleVersi...
I have always found this to be maddeningly counterintuitive, because surely at least some of these customers yield a net profit. But I have to admit that I’ve seen it done to very profitable effect.
I don't know as I don't bet but it seems counter-intuitive that just charging a commission would change the dynamic.
There is 0 risk for the exchange and the bettors can only use what they put in front.
Bookies run some risk because they accept the bet first and try to hedge (or got more people to bet on the other side) later. The exchange doesn't have this problem.
Exchange doesn't even need to charge commission cause they make money on float.
on edit: so the problem is that of course the other user can default, but that is not the exchange screwing with you because it is to their benefit.
the above is much less likely if you are national, but there may be small competitors with an advantage live this you are trying to compete with
That’s what the moving price / odds is for, to rebalance the willingness to take both sides of the bet.
A stock exchange won’t start holding a book of shares to give “better” prices to customers. What would that even mean? If the price is better for the buyer it will be worse for the seller! (If you mean that they will buy for a high price and sell for a low price to keep all customers happy maybe the customers won’t go anywhere but the “exchange” will go bankrupt.)
Why would a betting exchange be different? Does Betfair for example act like you suggests or is it just something you’re imagining?
NYSE and NASDAQ do complete with each other for companies to list on them. (as do other exchanges around the world). When a company is on more than one exchange there are people who make it their job to run "arbitrage" - this is they buy on one and sell on the other anytime the prices are different and this keeps things in check.
It is also valid for betting platform to run arbitrage with their competitors - but various anti-monopoly laws and other such things should(!) get in the way. I don't know what they are doing about this or exactly what the law says. As such I don't know what Betfair is really doing, but I know this is a risk they somehow either take (which if they are national might be low enough), or if they somehow get arbitrage done.
And betting platform is normally both the exchange and the broker. As such they have this risk and need to mitigate it while staying within the law. There are many ways to abuse mitigation that need to be illegal and so it must be hard to mitigate - this doesn't mean impossible.
Betting exchanges are different from bookmakers.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Betting_exchanges
Maybe you’re now using “platforms” to refer to everything but the discussion was specific to exchanges as opposed to bookmakers.
How Kalshi and prediction markets are disrupting sports betting: https://www.espn.com/espn/betting/story/_/id/45377686/kalshi...
As such I still need to stand by what I said: at least for now the online platforms are not exchanges (though some are trying to move that way)
> "We are simply an exchange. So we sit between people that are buying contracts on a yes and a no side. We don't win by people losing. And we don't lose by people winning. We simply sit in between that transaction."
I don’t know what else would you like to be told. That’s an exchange, with one user taking one side and another taking the other side. No brokers are involved when end-users connect directly to the exchange.
Wikipedia mentions that they would like other platforms to give access to the exhange, and the existence of market makers (one affiliate company, one independent company) that may provide liquidity. But the basic exchange is user-to-user.
Its the same as poker. An exchange wants a bunch of equally skilled players betting against each other. If everyone has zero edge, all the money stays on the exchange betting over and over and the money eventually all goes to the exchange in commissions.
Players with a strong edge dramatically reduce the time before the losing players run out of money, meaning less commissions for the exchange.
FWIW, an exchange doesn't necessarily want a bunch of equally skilled players betting each other, they want a lopsided book on the bigger markets to attract domestic bookies and match-makers laying or staking across multiple platforms to leverage Matched betting discrepancies on promotions for new players etc...
//Players with a strong edge dramatically reduce the time before the losing players run out of money, meaning less commissions for the exchange.
Poker Players with a strong edge have a +ev Variance. Over 100 hands they're not guaranteed to be a winner. Over 10,000 hands they are.
YMMV massively in other sports, but for horse racing the big gamblers tend to only put down big money once or twice a year on maidens and trial-runners for Cheltenham or Grand National. They wouldn't touch a big festival other than for fun.
The problem has something to do with the asymmetry of information or bargaining-power. Unlike card games, the house has quite an advantage in data-mining.
It's so easy to just ban any user who gets "too lucky" (simply ban the top ~0.1% of your userbase every week) why waste resources on offering actually fair bets? And the requirement for "fair bets" probably interferes with the requirement for bets to be as attractive to "regular users" as possible.
Don't forget the possibility of promotions, which is a major thing for marketing and distinguishing yourself from the pack.
A world of fair bets would be a world where you would need to market your superior odds (e.g. what pinnacle does).. which is directly at odds with fleecing your under-educated customer base.
They would know whether you make bad choices on Tuesdays, how people of your nationality and consumer preferences react to seeing an Ace, they can deal the better card to the person they’d like to have win, or the opposite, they know what effect the equivalent of a hot waitress bringing you free drinks will be on you specifically as well as on people statistically similar to you and at what moment in time…
Do you just not play against the house when you play cards? And do you 100% trust the house to deal randomly? Does the house not care at all who wins at cards?
Sorry if these are stupid questions, I don’t gamble, but it seems like they have lots of actionable data if they want to use it. Even if they only use it to get you to play more (or less).
If they don't purchase his odds (effectively paying him not to play), he just plays them. Wins either way. I dont think he has ever been banned, but I think thats because they appreciate the option to purchase his service.
I'm not from US, I'm from EU but I'm still paranoid of that so I only sports bet at state owned lottery/betting company.
Is there some specific EU regulation guaranteeing the right to place bets even if the house is losing?
Big bookies won't have you so easily. Multiple small ones will but you will get your money back. They not paying is a very small risk even if they decide to not do business with you later.
If you happen to be too lucky while placing a bet or gambling, the person can simply say ‘no you’re not entitled to the money’. That is simply the law in Ireland”. https://www.thejournal.ie/court-gamblers-not-paid-d1-casino-...
The hilarious thing is that if a Betting Company allows you to beg on margin/credit, then they can't subsequently sue you for the money either https://www.algoodbody.com/insights-publications/high-court-...
It is not true that you get banned if you win too often, but it is true that you get banned, and flagged, if your winning patterns are suspicious.
It's essentially like in a casino. You can win more than once and big, good for you.
But if patterns emerge, you get banned.
E.g. Betting small sums on football and suddenly betting very big on a specific baseball game and winning. Do it few times and you're banned as it's obviously strange.
The intention of the mathematician friends of yours may be to prevent money laundering and match fixing from being profitable (and thereby providing a public good). However, so many genuine sharp and/or plain lucky bettors are caught in these AML & Match Fixing cross-fires, it would be very naive to assume these are all just unfortunate false positives.
Sportsbooks are however legally hamstrung in what they can admit to of course. By doing so they would also admit to completely ignoring and even violating one of the core duties imposed on legal sportsbooks: the duty of care (in EU countries at least this is supposedly an important aspect of the legalisation).
By kicking someone off your platform, you definitely no longer have any way to nudge their behaviour into something less self-destructive. Some players might quit, but for those that do not: Illegal sportsbooks will try to take even more advantage of their players, and now you have also indirectly caused the financing of all kinds of other activities that AML regulation is specifically designed to prevent.
My hot take: your mathematician friends looking at suspicious betting patterns are a way for sportsbooks to greenwash and "legalize" their exploitative practices.
I have no clue, but I'm sure that it's meant to make money, not be a charity. If someone does show some suspicious alpha he gets banned.
Users with non-suspicious alpha are generally kept on the platform but they get limits (how much can they bet).
I absolutely believe that the betting industry is exploitative in any case. It's not a business where I would want to be involved.
The basic bargain of sportsbetting legalization is that sportsbooks are allowed to legally operate (retain a license) in this lucrative market if they 1) ensure taxes are paid, 2) the money involved is not flowing to bad actors (e.g. through match fixing and other methods of money laundry), 3) the sports themselves are not corrupted (imo an impossibility, but a different discussion) and 4) gamblers are taken care of properly (i.e. nudged away from self-destructive behaviours).
Point 1 is one of those unavoidable things like death. Point 2 is actually in line with their own incentives: match fixing directly hurts their bottom line by paying out on essentially highly mispriced odds. Point 3 is a much bigger discussion, which I feel they are already failing on (for me as a sports viewer with the incessant ads, but also in protecting the athletes that are not in the top 0.01% of any sports).
Point 4 however is something they are claiming they are doing, but in actuality it is complete reversed: the illegal sportsbetting market is, by all measures, out-growing the legal one. In the current environment, the major thing sportsbook legalization did is to provide a gateway drug for the illegal market. Limits and bans in order to (POSIWID) protect margins are the strongest nudges gamblers experience to move from legal to illegal sportsbooks.
> It's not a business where I would want to be involved.
Good :) The fewer competent individuals involved in any way, the harder it is for (owners of) sportsbooks to claim they are upholding their side of the bargain, as this will stand or fall with the competent execution of the AML/Match fixing & duty of care controls. Now to actively discourage others from working there as well...
In a somewhat ironic turn of events the more regulation you have, the worse it is for the customer. Big regulatory burdens require the bookies to extract more from the users, making the offerings more predatory. This is also why the likes of Kalshi can provide a better product to customers at the moment - because they ignore all the regulation.
- How many golf ball fit in a school bus?
Or the like that dominated Google hiring for nearly a decade. No the hot new interview question will be:
- Do you have an account with any of the major sports bettors in good standing?
The Goofus answer to this is : Yes, I can bet whatever I like with them (they are an idiot that doesn't understand how money works. Hire appropriately)
The Gallant answer is: No, I don't do sports betting. (This shows they at least know to lie about it)
The Galaxy answer is: No, they banned me (only sharps get banned, meaning they are either very lucky or very good with probabilities and numbers)
There exists now the potential for a small service company that can help interviewees and the spouses of gambling addicts: We'll make you look like a sharp to the sports betting companies. You sign up for the service and a big-time sharp takes over your accounts (or directs you personally) and tells you what to bet and where. They then give you the money to bet, making you effectively a mule for them. It's win-win. Real sharps get a mule, you get to look like a sharp and you have the proof. This also works for the family of addicts (probably the larger market), as their affected loved-one gets banned/downgraded and all the money stops flowing out of their accounts.
FOI in EU means you can get the notes attached to your account - the insights can be staggering, down to friend and family connections with Jockeys or Racing Stables, Sports Personalities or High Net Worth individuals.
Or they just don’t do it? I don’t enjoy gambling at all. I don’t do it in casinos, I don’t do it online, and I don’t even do it with friends where there’s no “house” to pay off. I think the worst night gambling I’ve ever experienced, I lost $20. I still remember it.
Many developed countries are struggling with birth rates for example. Should that be regulated? It is harming countries much more than gambling could ever have. The whole right-wing resurgence happening across western democracies is a direct consequence of lower birth rates demanding offshoring and immigration.
The kind of folks who will take that offer are more likely to be terrible parents.
Predatory advertising, gambling, they both prey on people.
Cards on the table, I think both advertising and gambling should be heavily controlled.
Anyway, my point, that you seem to have completely missed, is that some rules that Americans would reflexively dismiss with a thought-terminating cliche like "nanny state" are in fact necessary. You wouldn't want the road to be a free for all, would you? Well, I don't want psychological warfare to be legal and used to trick my neighbor into losing vast sums of money to online platforms. Poor, addicted citizens make the country worse for everyone.
Also, "But the person that sells them the poison has to make sure they are of sound mind" made me laugh. When has it ever been in the business owner's interest to vet his clients? Legalize fent and in a year, half the superbowl ads will be selling you drugs in rainbowy attention-grabbing displays of decadence.
The bit about poor addicted citizens (if it actually is the cause,instead of welfare and similar things), it sounds like your priority is improving the economy despite its effects on people's rights?
> When has it ever been in the business owner's interest to vet his clients?
When not doing so could mean serious consequences, like capital punishment or life in prison.
Someone high on heroin or going through withdrawal from heroin is not of sound mind.
I think about the alternate universe where I won and started betting more a lot; sort of a "there but for the grace of god go I" situation.
I am very very careful around activities and substances which could become addictive, because I know from benign life experiences that I sometimes lack the self control to stop.
It would probably be fine but there are no upsides risking it.
That and ever since my undergrad statistics class I hate the thought of playing games which are staked against me from the beginning. The thought of betting or gambling feels like voluntarily signing up to be swindeled.
If my beloved team wins, I’m ecstatic and don’t really care I lost $50. If they lose, well, at least I have $50.
Well aside the organised criminal element that goes hand-in-hand with legal gambling, it destroys people's ability to make rational choices.
But yes, I'm also lucky enough to have never won.
Even then it's hard to ignore that both these things destroy people with precious little informed consent. If you're the sort of person who gets hooked, you're stuffed.
Drafting players and then fielding a team every week for a season can be fun if you like the sport.
The problem for me is that I had no idea with regards to anything about football, so my picks weren't radically different than a random number generator, and unsurprisingly I lost. I had absolutely no fun in the process and I would have rather spent that $50 on a video game or something.
You don’t have to know much about football, and it gives some common ground for small talk.
My brother jokes and says I am in the top 1% of sports bettors now
50% of all men below 50 have an online sports betting account.
Like how was this data/survey gathered/administrated? Sample size ect...
Also I don't understand how sports seem to get so much attention. Like they are just games why?
Another post I was reading a bit ago was how Spain what basically suffering internet outages to stop pirate streams of games on the weekend: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
Like why is a game considered so important that even internet traffic has to suffer. It boggles my mind.
Because they are fun.
Because that game makes 1.8 billion dollars a year in TV licensing rights [1], and pirates undercut the pay-TV stations' ability to recoup these expenses.
Add in a ... questionable legal system, club and league presidents with friends with very very deep pockets, cloud providers that don't care what they host as long as the legal system of their host country absolves them of liabilities and that's how you get inane rulings like this.
If you read to the bottom they explain their methodology.
I'd rather not contribute to this as well.
I'm 27. Among me and a hastily-assembled list of 14 of my male friends, 7 of us definitely have at least one sports betting account, 4 definitely don't, and I'm not sure about the other 4. I'd bet (heh) at least one of them has an account.
It might be more informative to see how many men actually use their sports betting accounts. Technically I have an account, but I haven't used it in over 2 years. Won a bet that the Heat would beat the Celtics in the conference finals, realized I was now net-positive by several hundred dollars, cashed out, and uninstalled the app. Never looked back.
A sibling poster posted a link to Siena survey that has related betting statistics. For males the percentage that "have accounts" vs those who "had accounts" is 30% and 6% respectively. You see similar ratios in the age breakdowns. Therefore it's safe to say that around 40% of males below 50 "have" betting accounts.
If you didn't know it was legal, you're probably well outside the target audience.
I don't bet at all (excluding the financial markets), but I'm often surprised at how many of my relatives and people from all walks of life pull out their phone and fire up an online betting app. All men.
I suspect the amount of US men who regularly bet on sports is much, much lower.
That being said: I find sports extremely boring. If I had a lot of social pressure to watch sports, I'd probably gamble, just to keep the game interesting.
You may stop short of making sport gambling illegal, but you should at least make it annoying. Completely ban advertising it, for one. Set harsh legal limits on user spending - so that the betting companies aren't incentivized to burn through their users and extract the entire life savings out of them.
The fact that these limits don't exist seems like evidence that the lawmakers didn't care about the effects on society.
The lawmakers care primarily about the wants of their corporate donors, which is why this legalized gambling situation arose, and also why you have many geriatric congress people on both sides of the aisle suddenly very interested in legitimizing crypto with soft "regulation".
Well, sports betting could have the same mechanism, where you are only allowed to bet an amount proportional to your line of credit.
If the banks don't trust you to spend over that limit and honour your debt, why should betting houses be any different?
If we truly believe that sports betting (at this scale, at our fingertips on our phones, unlimited) is bad... trying to band-aid it won't work.
Thus things might have a chance that otherwise would have a hard time passing legislation simply because they are restrictive for the upper class.
So if there aren't any natural incentives you just make up artificial ones. One such mechanism is regulation, just like with the tobacco industry.
“Banks are funded with deposits” = “Deposits are liabilities for banks”
——
Yes, deposits in current accounts are *liabilities* from a bank's point of view. This may seem counterintuitive, as we typically think of deposits as the bank's money. However, in accounting terms, a liability is something a business owes to others.
### The Bank Owes You Your Money
When you deposit money into a current account, you are essentially lending that money to the bank. The bank has an obligation to return these funds to you whenever you demand them, whether by withdrawing cash from an ATM, writing a check, or making an electronic payment. This obligation to repay the depositor is what makes the deposit a liability for the bank.
### How it Works on a Bank's Balance Sheet
A bank's financial health is represented by its balance sheet, which must always balance. The basic accounting equation is:
$$Assets = Liabilities + Equity$$
Here's a simplified breakdown of how your deposit fits in:
* *Liabilities:* Your current account deposit is recorded on the liability side of the bank's balance sheet. It represents a debt the bank owes to you. Other liabilities for a bank include savings account deposits, certificates of deposit (CDs), and money borrowed from other financial institutions.
* *Assets:* When you deposit cash, the bank's cash holdings (an asset) increase. The bank then uses the funds from your deposit to generate income by making loans to other customers or by investing in securities. These loans and investments are considered assets for the bank because they represent money that is owed to the bank.
*In essence, the bank takes on a liability (your deposit) and creates an asset (a loan or investment).* The bank's profit comes from the difference between the interest it earns on its assets (e.g., the interest rate on a loan) and the interest it pays on its liabilities (e.g., the interest paid on a savings account, though current accounts often have very low or no interest).
Therefore, from the bank's perspective, the money you have in your current account is not its own money but rather a debt it must be prepared to repay at any time.
With young people, not sure that it matters. They will become gambling age eventually. The psychological affects are there. See Genshin and Monopoly Go.
DFS, in particular, was and is very legitimately a game of skill. (In fact, looking at it from an Elo perspective and from the perspective of "Who should win?", it's more of a game of skill than the sports themselves!) There was absolutely no reason for it to be made illegal, other than to protect the tribal gaming interests in California and Florida. They pushed back so hard and with such little justification that the tide really, really turned against them in a much more broad way than they ever anticipated.
The ironic thing is, Matt King at FD and Jason Robins at DK probably would have been perfectly happy if the outcome had been that they be allowed to merge and that DFS is legalized and regulated. Instead Robins is a billionaire and Flutter made the best corporate acquisition of the 2010s.
But even on top of that, the coverage of this issue is severely lacking. There were already many online sports books "legally" HQ'd in the Caribbean or other offshore locales. They were pointed to as proof of how much money could be made and money won. That's the story. We allowed greed to addict millions of young men on sports gambling because we lost our spines in this country.
A game that is both skill and gambling (of which there are many) still generally is regulated as gambling.
Chess wouldn't be as addictive anyway. You need a bit more luck ingrained in the game mechanics to trigger the addiction mechanisms. In games of skill like poker people get deluded all the time because they see lucky wins of their opponents and unlucky losses of their own. People are very bad at making judgements about probability so a lot of them get deluded into thinking "if only unlikely X didn't happen 3 times recently I would be ahead".
This happens in both poker and sports betting. In both games you can always pick some unlucky events (ball hit the post, referee gave an unjustified penalty, the only card falling on the river) and point to them to say "if only" while missing all the small lucky events on your side.
With games of skill that also have a strong luck element (poker, fantasy sports, betting horses, etc.) you can fool yourself very easily into thinking the odds are in your favor when they are not. If you won you thought it was because you played better, if you lost you got unlucky, and if you don’t track it (even many professional players don’t) you may have a hard time even knowing after a long sample size where you stood.
Gambling relies on the ability of anyone to get lucky and win on any given day mechanisms rely on inconsistent rewards.
If DFS is legal roulette should be legal as well because it has fewer negative consequences for society.
I know it's popular narrative among pro gamblers that games of skill deserve a different (better) treatment but it's just self serving nonsense in my view (I've spent most of my adult life in a gambling world as both a pro player and software developer).
This is the worst thing about sports betting.
A close second is being shown the odds for every little thing during the live broadcasts.
Apple TV is the worst offender. Their coverage of Major League Baseball was already bad, but they found a way to make it even worse by constantly showing the odds of this, that, or the other.
The casino will be accounting/forecasting a 5% take across stakes made as it's super complicated with jackpot contributions/payouts and stuff.
These machines are there to be always accessible and to train the human in just the right way so as to get you addicted.
I used to work with a guy who had a long stint at IGT. He said the most popular game he ever "made" was to take his previously most popular game and just have one set of controls play 4 of the same game all at the same time on one screen.
All go towards the same thing - dopamine addiction as an activity.
I think I just wanted to say that the perception of a 90% "success rate" v's all or nothing with sports betting felt like a troublesome comparison, for me at least. These games arent safer or fairer at all - they are both doing the same thing - in different doses to different audiences.
Many of my slots players didn't consider what they did "gambling" at all.
This is totally disingenuous. Why else are gambling providers forced to include addiction recovery phone numbers with their ads?
> A ticket to the game is $100+, is that money wasted too?
No, and this is equally as insincere as your first statement. Gambling takes money without offering a fair return in goods or services.
Some people are sick and cant control themselves.
> No, and this is equally as insincere as your first statement.
Neither comments were insincere.
> Gambling takes money without offering a fair return in goods or services.
It provides entertainment, same thing tickets to the event provide. A lot cheaper than seeing the game in person too.
If people being sick and not being to control themselves required an intervention phone number in general, we'd run out of 10-digit numbers faster than Elon lasted in the government :)
> It provides entertainment, same thing tickets to the event provide. A lot cheaper than seeing the game in person too.
This 100% is the reason most if not all of my friends put money on the games. Not sure why this is so hard for A LOT of people to understand, putting money on the games gives many people I know more of a rush than sky diving
Lest us not forget the origins of prohibition where women were collectively extremely upset about their husbands constantly going out and spending their salary on drinking instead of actually buying food and etc for the family.
Understanding math isn't enough I think it is largely emotion driven. Like a fun thing to do, not work.
There are also some games with accumulating jackpots that might turn ev > 1.
In 1992, when the innocuously named “Proposition A” finally passed, these monstrous “riverboat casinos” were built all along the Missouri riverfront.
He said before he died, “it’s funny, once it passed, there weren’t any more votes on it”.
And that’s how this stuff becomes legal.
One thing is very different from the other.
Eventually the sports-betting industry wins its lobbying campaign. But what did they win? The different sports-betting companies are in fierce and unprofitable competition, while the advertising industry walks off with all the profits.
That tale is at its most ironic when the advertising industry is consolidated and makes monopoly profits on advertising on behalf of sports-betting companies.
Sports betting has significant negative impacts. For every $1 a household spent on betting, it reduced savings by $2. https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/online-spor.... This impacts not just individuals, but spouses and children who don’t “consent” to the negative impacts this has on their lives.
And it really saddens me to see American children being introduced to gambling at a younger and younger age via things like loot boxes, blind boxes, and trading card game speculation.
I wonder if that makes them more or less vulnerable later in life. Are lootboxes a vaccine or a devastating childhood infection?
I find it telling the the people that have this opinion always seem to believe that they are going to be the arbiters of how other people should live, and that they themselves are without the vices that they would regulate.
And I even agree on the betting bit: it's bad. But then again, so is voting for criminals and yet, we allow it and arguably that causes a lot more damage than betting.
Did you ask OP if they think that, or are you just assuming that?
I’ve been blessed not to have addictions to substances or gambling. But I’m a snacker and could afford to lose 25 pounds. (Cardiovascular issues present in south asians at a lower BMI than for others, apparently.) I’d love social reinforcement to help with weight management, e.g. portion sizes when eating out.
As for portion sizes: my simple rule is that if I did not put it on the plate myself I don't necessarily have to eat it and peer pressure be damned.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-04/illegal-tobacco-is-a-...
On the other hand, sports betting and advertising for it are absolutely rampant.
Also, these policies usually fail in getting existing users to quit, but they succeed in deterring prospective users. The idea that these policies are "not going very well" is an incredibly narrow-minded and short-sighted perspective.
While the article you linked points out that illicit tobacco sales make up a large percentage of the market, it’s a much smaller market. You might as well tell us that most guns sold in Japan are illegal, and therefore Japan has a bigger problem with guns than America.
I'm no fan of tobacco, I think taxing it heavily is good, and Australia's policies were (IMHO) working well until quite recently. But, as the article explains at length, the price difference is now so extreme and the legal risk of illegal sales so low that drug dealers are muscling in and we're getting drug dealer competition tactics as a result.
Australia doesn't let you bring a bottle of water onto planes going into their country, even if you bought it inside the airport. Allowing people to bring in drugs like tobacco but strictly forbidding a 1 dollar bottle of water is a problem with enforcement. If tobacco were treated the same way dangerous, addictive substances like H2O are, things might work better.
I think the same thing applies to most vices. Any friction in engaging in the vice is a moderating influence. Someone is more likely to get dangerously drunk while drinking at home than at a bar in which you have to order every drink from a bartender. It was likely more difficult to fall into a porn addiction if you needed to look another human in the eyes when you rented that dirty VHS tape. It's easier to overeat if you're having the food delivered to your home than if you order every item from a waiter in a restaurant. When we all know an activity should be done in moderation, making it as easy to engage in that behavior as possible is probably a bad idea.
I would also spend way more money on gambling when at a location to do so. The desire to bet on sports on my phone is really low because it's boring so I won't do more than enough to make a game interesting.
When I used to have to make an effort to get things that are now legal but previously illegal I would be much more compelled to make that effort to avoid having to do it in the future when I wanted the thing. Which inevitably would lead to more doing of the thing. Now that I know I can get it anytime I don't actually care about it.
There are fake games, and even leagues, made specifically for people to bet on. To me there is no appeal, but I'd expect to someone gamblign there must be some appeal. See this article, there have been cases in cricket, but I know less about that game. https://josimarfootball.com/2024/10/21/childs-play/
I tend to agree with the parent that friction is useful for many 'sin activities' I might extend this to most drive through restaurants. For gambling having to go to a casino, a racetrack, or a bookkeeper who isn't legal all act as points where users drop out of the process. Having it on your phone is always available and the path of a user can be modified to get them to spend/bet more.
Some other good examples (I think) are simply watching things. It doesn't need to be porn, think about how many people are chronically watching mindless trash content for hours at a time because we've made constant scrolling an immersive experience available all the time everywhere. I know I am. We've gone so far as to even eliminate the necessity to decide what to watch, the media companies have automated the process of turning what used to be customers into their products and delegated the friction to the telecom companies. When you think about your phone bill, really we should be paying basically nothing for it (and in some places it's nearly that cheap), but in expensive places we're paying like $80/month to engage with 5 free addictions that only take value away from our lives. They're charging us to sell ourselves to each other.
Weed: I agree that it should be legal, but how many new customers have been created since a store opened in every available vacant commercial space within a legal jurisdiction?
The pursuits of car and oil companies have literally re-shaped the built environment in the name of making it as easy as possible to be sedentary when you'd otherwise have to move—most significantly so in places that missed out on dense urbanization in the pre-industrial period—and now all we know how to do is get in our big SUV and drive to Costco, then to McDonalds, because otherwise there's a near-zero likelihood you have access to more economical healthy choices that are persuasively close to not drive to. Most North American cities effectively made it illegal to do anything else but sprawl, and concentrated as much wealth and power as possible in the hands of mega-franchise companies and private equity while we watched our wetlands get paved over for parking lots (we unironically should have listened to Joni Mitchell on this one). Good luck opening up a new corner store, those only go on the main avenues and shockingly someone owns that land already.
Credit Cards: Obvious one, but if you obscure how much you've spent and eliminate the requirement to keep track of what's available to you, maybe even add a nice little ding sound when you tap your phone, you're going to buy a hell of a lot more.
Biggest scam of all time.
These new sports books are operating purely to enrich the owners of the platform. Ban 'em.
I've been in an online community where some users do a group buy for certain lottos when the prize is big enough. Sending $2 by paypal/venmo is easier and lower friction that going to one of the stores near me where I can but a ticket myself. I still think it's kinda dumb, but I do plenty of dumb things and I buy one infrequently enough to be ok with it.
Problem is, state funding for those public concerns are often reduced by the same (or more) amount lottery revenue generates. For example, Florida pitched their state lottery as funding education (amongst other "who could be against this?" programs), yet failed to inform voters that existing funding would ultimately be reduced in a compensatory fashion.
Here's a list of cricketers that have been banned over the years. Many were even the captain of their respective team:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cricketers_banned_for_...
The list also doesn't include players like Ricky Ponting, Mark Waugh and Shane Warne who got away with a fine from the ACB.
Federal laws (i.e., laws of the United States rather than the individual states) derive their authority from the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reads: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ No part of the Constitution delegates power to the United States to regulate intrastate sport or gambling; no later amendment repeals the Tenth with respect to sports gambling.
So Congress had no constitutional authority to pass the law in the first place.
I detest sports gambling with a passion, but that doesn’t matter: PASPA was never constitutional. The federal government has legitimate power to regulate interstate gambling and the states each have the ability to regulate intrastate gambling. I don’t think that it should be illegal, but I do think that it should be regulated like other addictive and dangerous things.
The problem was that PASPA was sloppy and didn’t do that; its mechanism was to tell states what laws they could or couldn’t pass, which is unconstitutional for reasons outside the Commerce Clause.
Per Proskauer:
> Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the opinion was Justice Alito's unequivocal statement that "Congress can regulate sports gambling directly," if it elects to do so. While Justice Thomas, citing an 1867 Supreme Court case, expressed doubt that Congress could prohibit sports betting that does not cross state lines, there appear to be at least eight Justices who believe that Congress has this authority under the Commerce Clause. Thus, Congress could adopt a uniform federal policy that would permit and regulate sports gambling throughout the nation and thereby preempt the various state laws. Alternatively, it could choose to outlaw sports gambling throughout the country, although that approach seems unlikely at this point.
https://www.proskauer.com/alert/us-supreme-court-strikes-dow...
Now, of course, the proverbial cat is out of the bag.
(IANAL, this is not legal advice.)
It is bizarre to me personally that what we want to regulate/stigmatize are sellers and even recreational users (50+% of men who have an account or whatever), and not the over users. Instead, we try to protect over users from themselves, and society from them, by making life worse for everyone else doing the pass time. That to me seems deeply immoral. By cracking down on abuse or consequences of abuse we could protect the society, and abusers themselves deserve everything they get - although if we treat them like children "you are demonstrably not responsible so like a 13 year old you don't get to drink/manage your own money anymore" that would also be accomplished.
If I had my way, everyone who has ever made a "why make it illegal/regulate it? People will just do it anyway."-style argument would be forced under penalty of law to write the above quote 300 times on a chalkboard.
He could not advertise. He could not send you push notifications or run AB tests on millions of users.
"Estimates of the scope of illegal sports betting in the United States range anywhere from $80 billion to $380 billion annually, making sports betting the most widespread and popular form of gambling in America."
which seems surprising even at the low end.
similarly from https://www.americangaming.org/new-aga-report-shows-american... in 2022
"AGA’s report estimates that Americans wager $63.8 billion with illegal bookies and offshore sites at a cost of $3.8 billion in gaming revenue and $700 million in state taxes. With Americans projected to place $100 billion in legal sports bets this year, these findings imply that illegal sportsbook operators are capturing nearly 40 percent of the U.S. sports betting market."
I think what would be more interesting to me is estimates on the unique number of citizens betting. Is it up? If so, how appreciably?
We as a society should get to decide what "freedoms" and what "constraints" make for a better society as a whole, don't we?
They are a harm to others. People with gambling addictions don't just hurt themselves - they hurt families, friends, and also the society at large as they come to be dependent on the safety net for substeance.
I think you dont need to make it illegal to keep it in check. A simple rule saying: IF a person spends more than 20% of the overall W2 or 1099 income on gambling, then the gambling house is liable for every 95 cents of every subsequent dollar paid out. We transfer liability for selling alcohol to irresponsible bartenders - casinos should also take the heat for the malaise they inflict.
You'd see very quickly how things get real.
Simply put, if a gambler shows up in court with a W2 and payouts to a gambling house, they get summary judgement against the house.
This works well because once codified ("no gambler shall owe more than 20% of their annual income to any gambling house, individually or in the aggregate") it triggers an unrecorded liability on the gambling house's clientele. In other words, the stock becomes radioactive , unless the gambling house has strong controls around client onboarding and monitoring. Auditors are never going to sign off on financials that have a huge liability unless it is proven there are strict controls in place to not let degenerate gambling continue.
The same principle could be applied to universities as well.
Basically, you have to shift the risk to the party abusing the system (in this case, not the system, but the addiction).
I don't personally agree with gambling, as I just don't understand how someone could possibly enjoy it; but, I sure as fuck believe that every human being can spend their hard-earned money however they see fit.
Churches, retailers, bars, strip clubs, restaurants, etc. All of these allow people to spend their hard-earned money in questionable ways and many folks go WAY overboard w/them. But, my guess is, you don't really want to regulate all of those; just the ones you disagree with.
Why? Do these people not live in society next to you? Don’t you subsidize their healthcare, the education of their kids, etc?
> But, my guess is, you don't really want to regulate all of those; just the ones you disagree with.
The only one of those I wouldn’t regulate is churches, and that’s because study after study shows that people who participate in organized religion are happier and healthier, and communities with healthy churches do better in social metrics than ones that don’t. E.g. Mormons live 5-10 years longer than white Americans generally: https://www.deseret.com/2010/4/13/20375744/ucla-study-proves.... (I suspect New England Congregationalists have similarly superlative outcomes, but I don’t have the data.) Imagine how much lower our healthcare costs would be if you could take the social magic Mormons do and apply it to the whole country.
Maybe we don’t have to ban coffee. But is the alternative really for society to suffer the negative externalities of every individual choice with no power to regulate those choices?
https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Smoking-and-th...
For example, the study above shows that smokers *are actually a net benefit* to the government's bottom line since they pay taxes throughout their lifetime on tobacco and then they die faster (therefore spending less money in the form of healthcare/ aged pensions).
I'm really not comfortable with the idea that we should only permit activities that are purely harmless. 30-50 people die each year in skiing accidents in the US alone. Those people have families too. Where do you want to draw the line?
Gambling and Social media do exactly that. In fact social media has purposely adopted the exact same patterns of gambling to make it so that "scrolling" IS gambling, but it's time and enjoyment instead of money. They don't just show you what you want all the time, they induce FOMO by only occasionally offering rewarding content, which results in compulsive usage.
I don't like these modern temperance movements. Leave people alone.
Have you noticed how things are going? Do you genuinely believe these are non-factors?
On the supermajority bit, in more and more countries there's already a supermajority for banning phones from schools, more and more for banning it for children altogether, and so on. I think that's a clear sign people would actually be in favour of quite a lot of measures to tone things down, like the one I mentioned. Total bans I wouldn't vouch for.
John Adams said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He was making an important point that has nothing to do with theology. Society can have extensive individual freedoms when people are socialized to mostly to make the right decisions without government coercion. If we loosen the social guardrails, as we have done, more government coercion becomes necessary to suppress anti-social behavior.
Separately from that, I don't think that the original US constitution - you know, the document that explicitly protected the interests of slave owners, i.e. the vilest kind of filth - could be meaningfully said to be made for "a moral and religious People". Or, if we take that at face value, then that tells us volumes about the value of said morals and said religion, and it's deeply negative.
It’s interesting that you think freedom is only “meaningful” if people actually engage in the anti-social conduct which they’re free to do. I would say the point of freedom is to eliminate the apparatus of control because you can trust nearly all people to do the right thing without it. That’s the highest form of society.
That slavery existed is not some trump card that negates everything else. It’s also a particularly uneducated comment to level at John Adams of all people. The idea that slavery is intolerable, which you easily hold in your head in 2025 without having worked for it—was bequeathed to you by John Adams and his ilk. In 1789, you would have looked the other way at slavery, just like you look the other way at everything you tolerate today. You probably would’ve even called John Adams a religious nut for believing everyone was created equal in the eyes of god, and demanded scientific proof of that.
That's a rather US centric point of view. Slavery was considered intolerable in many places, the US was different in that it actually allowed it for as long as it did. Of course there are many guises for slavery that are practiced in other places but on a moral level lots of people realize it is wrong and John Adams had absolutely nothing to do with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
You could spend a good chunk of a lifetime studying this subject and still not have the complete picture. The main difference is not the 'opposition to slavery with the moral fervor of the Anglos' as much as the resistance to getting rid of slavery.
That is what sets the US apart, the stark division between the pro and the con side and the fact that the South figured out that this was the thing that they could not give up. And their roots were just the same as the side that opposed them, they just had an economic interest.
Not quite. It means, individuals have to have the freedom to make their own choices, because nobody can be trusted to know what the "right" choices are and dictate them to others.
By "a moral and religious People", John Adams did not mean that every one of those people must agree on exactly what the right thing to do is. He meant that the people have to have the concept of right and wrong as things they are supposed to discern, things outside themselves that aren't dictated by any other authority (or at least not any human one), and to understand that they have a duty to do their best to make the right choices. The problem with our society today is that that concept of "right" has been discarded; instead there is a different concept of "right" that revolves around adherence to whatever political ideology is favored by those in power.
> more government coercion becomes necessary to suppress anti-social behavior
The problem is that the government can't be trusted to do that job. That's what "freedom" means in the American context. That's why the US Constitution doesn't give the Federal government the power to do it. The fact that our government does it anyway is a bug, not a feature.
I certainly enjoy mainstream social media platforms but find it frustrating that the company is motivated to show me what I don't want to see and make it difficult to find the content I prefer. Simultaneously this is done while creating walled gardens to limit open access to information that is only the property of the platform by virtue of anti-competitive user agreements.
First and for most user generated content should be openly accessible.
So now what if my hobby is betting on sports? I don't see a difference.
their activity funds it - where taxed - and their activity doesn't strain it either
Also, because their gambling asses smart wifes divorced get lonely and somehow it becomes contribution to male loneliness epidemic and then we have right wing using them as argument to stop "no fault divorce" and restrict women so they have no choice.
as initiation to your startup accelerator?
It seems totally unbalanced, predatory, like an overt scam.
I would feel a lot better about the law permitting sports gambling if it also required companies to accept bets from all gamblers. It likely would reduce margins and feel a lot riskier to the companies. Like with poker… you can’t sit down at the table hoping to win big without also risking to lose big.
Having a high skill player at a table/bookie breaks this cycle. People start losing faster, and end up playing less. The high skill player continuously drains money from the table, money that would have been bet again in a later bet if it had gone to an average player.
Can't have that.
It's probably included because some states require it and it's easy to just make one commercial. For example, Virginia 11VAC5-70-240.B "Advertising, marketing, and promotional materials shall include a responsible gaming message, which includes, at a minimum, a director-approved problem gambling helpline number and an assistance and prevention message, except as otherwise permitted by the director for certain mediums such as social media messages. "
In other rich states, you can do everything with a little bit of money, just pricy. In poor states, they're often theocratic and tightly regulate things but you can still do everything with a little bit of money.
Virginia on the other hand, wealthy various economic drivers and still regulate everything fun out of existence in the least entertaining way possible. Winning the prize of worst state in the union.
There is just too much money to be made in that space. It's sickening.
And with apps on phones, it's 24/7 for some people. They get sucked in and gamed like babies bums in talc powder.
And it started with Twitch now. Kids get addicted watching these rigged players and believe they too can get rich doing it. It's a form of opioid legalised because the government gets the kick back.
"50% of all men below 50 have an online sports betting account"
This might be misleading. Many people created accounts to get promotional credit to play with and never played again. A better measure would be how many people are active.
My charitable interpretation is that it's a way for fans to feel more invested in the game. When their team wins they also do.
Because, like the article said, 97% of users lose money sports betting.
It's like the lottery (which I also didn't like the states legalizing). You're essentially taxing poor / uneducated people but with sports betting that tax is a profit to some random businessmen.
It's just like a drug. Just because some people like it, doesn't mean we should allow people to monetize the addiction to it.
I remember being astonished walking around London for the first time 15 years ago after getting off the plane from the US and seeing a place called "Ladbrokes" that really would leave lads broke.
> I'm anti gambling personally which is part of why i hate crypto but i don't get why sports betting in particular is so objectionable.
There's a direct onramp from something very popular (sports) into sitting on your couch and losing all your money on your phone. It also makes sports worse for everyone who doesn't gamble on it too.
The reason why there's so much fixation on sport betting in particular is partly because it is doubly addictive (because emotions tend to run high around sports, team sports especially, so even people who might not have bet in a casino might be betting on a game by their favorite team, for example). And partly because, on top of all the other problems with gambling, it creates perverse incentives for the teams to fix games.
When it was just a goofy project only taken seriously by distributed systems geeks and Ancap libertarians, there wasn't much to regulate and it could slide under the radar for quite awhile. Then pretty rapidly it sort of became so big that it wasn't trivial to do actually ban it.
Then we got a president who used it as a streamlined bribery platform.
One of them is gambling.
The other is modern marketing.
Combined, they represent a substantial harm.
With nearly all of our social agency - which in our society means money - already in the possession of a tiny fraction of the country, with the bottom half of the country having approximately zero savings and spending at least as much as they have income? Any revenue gleaned from their dysfunctional attitude becomes a collective hardship, money that needs to be replaced by some form of subsidy to maintain our quality of life and avoid spillover problems like property crime.
we literally see an anti government protest around the world in past few month from UK to Nepal to Australia
because they got divided between left vs right political spectrum that ignore massive issue that is happening right now
if there is a protest from other country, it labelled as anti government protest but if there are protest on US, it called an left/right protest
> social agency
> "Social agency" has two primary meanings: first, a governmental or private organization providing community-focused health, welfare, and rehabilitation services to improve quality of life. Second, it refers to the human capacity for individuals and groups to act independently, make choices, and effect change in their social environment.Yet they play anyway. Why? They LIKE to play. They enjoy the games. They enjoy the environment. They’re not all there trying to get money for rent on their trailer or for more cigarettes.
Hanging out at a Vegas sportbook on Super Bowl Sunday is fun. Going to a track, nice day in the sun, couple bucks on some ponies — it’s fun. Spend some time at a crowded, loud, hot crap table. It’s fun, it’s exciting.
Most folks have their head on their shoulders. Most folks have a budget.
Yes, it’s predatory. History and the media is filled with stories about the dark side of it. I, as a rule, don’t support it. If it shows up on a ballot, I vote it down. I wish the local tribes were renowned for their light industry and engineering firms instead of gaming.
But to characterize anyone who enjoys the play as a fool is painting with a very broad brush.
unlike youtube shorts, the effect on society is immediately measurable
both are iq tests
If we assume that these are all cases that he was on the winning side of, then good on him for the first one, but dude sure has a lot to answer for with the other ones and the case under discussion in this article.
Then FanDuel and DraftKings arrived with a lot of investor capital, and had the money and power to push through the legalization.
It was never morals that kept gambling from being legalized elsewhere, it was protectionism.
This isn't even about democracy and liberties. Even monarchies and communist regimes have no right. First, it is tax revenue, second it does not harm or directly affect anyone other than the gambler in a negative way, third anti-gambling laws incentivize and enable criminal enterprises. Secret betting rings are usually operated by organized crime.
"You might be homeless or dependent on welfare if you lose all your money"... ok but society helping homeless and impoverished people does not give it the right to police everyone else. Don't help those people if you think they're gambling addicts or don't help them at all. Needed help that comes with sacrificing freedoms is slavery.
"People gamble away their family's money"... ok, then their family sounds like it has a problem that doesn't need governmental meddling. How about we regulate people that aren't ambitious enough to support their family as well. Money left on the table is money lost after all.
Even if less gambling is better for society as a whole, it still does not give society the right to infringe on individuals' ability to be idiots. It is better if people get married for example, that's why tax breaks for that exist (which i disagree with) but society doesn't go around regulating unmarried people or people who refuse to have children (much more harm to society that way than any gambling outbreak could ever cause!).
This sounds fine in theory but it ignores the fact that gambling today isn’t just about individuals making free choices in a vacuum. There’s an active, systemic push to get people hooked. Millions (billions?) are spent on ads, algorithms, and dark patterns designed to keep people hooked. That's not freedom - that's exploitation.
With modern tech like gambling apps on your phone, 24/7 internet access, social media tie-ins the problem multiplies. You don't have to go to a casino when you have one in your pocket. The same tricks that make people lose hours on TikTok are being weaponized to make them lose their money.
Freedom matters. But if the entire system is engineered to trap people in endless dopamine hits, then society has to step in. Not to ban choice, but to create a framework that tilts people away from predatory addiction loops and toward things that actually build resilience and meaning. Otherwise “freedom” just becomes another word for “you’re on your own while other people drain you dry.”
I think it is the government's responsibility to protect those who can't defend themselves. Women beat by men. Employees being abused by their bosses. People getting robbed or conned.
I happen to be a somewhat big guy, at least compared to the average around where I live. Partially as a result of this I have never been mugged in my life. But that doesn't mean that I think that when someone gets mugged they don't need "government meddling". I know that other people are not like me. I don't call them "wimps" and say that "it's their right to be small" or that "they should have hit the gym more often".
Mental health issues are a bitch. Compulsive behavior issues suck. You sound like someone who doesn't have them. That's great! But hopefully you can understand that other people can have them. Calling them "idiots" is just a trick your brain does so that it can put a label on a problem so you don't have to think about it more deeply. I invite you to spend the 2 calories that it takes to look behind that label.
Hopefully you will find that gambling companies are naturally be incentivized to predate on people with mental health issues, who are a vulnerable group.
And that is why gambling needs to be heavily regulated, if not banned outright.
First, I chose "idiots" carefully, if a person has a pre-existing condition or some other weakness, "idiot" excludes them as you've so obviously noted and they should be protected. However, if they chose to enter a life of addiction, fully being informed that even gambling once will addict them, they fall under the "idiot" category, although there are better terms to use and I'm being lazy with my wording there.
Your rant about the government protecting people and you not getting mugged has nothing to do with what I'm saying,that's false equivalency.
I have every right to enter a life of addiction and ruin myself, as do you. i have every right to get addicted and live a miserable and short life. it isn't a great idea, but it is none of your business either.
As I stated very clearly, banning and regulating harmful and deceptive practices by gambling companies is something I support fully. What insane is you thinking you have a right to prevent me from doing something that doesn't affect you in the least because you want to force yourself to being everyone's caretaker. There should be a term for this sickness, perhaps "hostile and performative empathy"?
Help those who can't help themselves and ask for help! You don't get to decide who can't help themselves unless they can't make decisions or communicate on their own. Sane adults can speak up for themselves and tell you if they need help. And your idea of help? what is it? throwing people in prison? that's what you're advocating, you understand why that's insane right? Short of murdering a person, that is the worst thing you can do to them, do you get that? When you say "banning" it must be enforced somehow. Or perhaps you think it will be a small fine, even if that was the case, what happens when gamblers who lost all their money can't pay a fine, other than imprisonment? Loan sharks to pay your fines, and a life of crime to pay the loansharks? Either way, it ends up in people being forced to participate in worse and worse crime and thus causing actual harm to others because of your unending empathy.
I return your invitation to spend a little more than 2 calories and think about what we're discussing here. Your nanny state beating people until they die for their own good.
Ok. Glad that we have some common ground there, then. If not by regulating gambling companies, how do you propose these people should be protected?
I think having some data would help. Here's my first hit from a google the first hit I got:
https://worldmetrics.org/online-gambling-addiction-statistic...
From there, I highlight 2:
- 2% of global population suffers from gambling disorder
- Approximately 25% of online gamblers are classified as problem gamblers based on clinical screening tools
> You not getting mugged has nothing to do with what I'm saying,that's false equivalency.
Why, exactly?
> I have every right to enter a life of addiction and ruin myself, as do you.
Yeah here is the thing. You don't know if I have a mental health disorder. Assuming that I do, gambling companies will use any trick they can to hook me into giving them all my money.
> A right to prevent me from doing something that doesn't affect you
I agree the government doesn't need to "prevent you from anything". What I'm saying is that I want them to prevent gambling companies from doing things to me - a hypothetical gambling addict.
I, as a potential person with compulsive behavior, will have gambling companies showing me ads on the street. Tagging me up and showing me adds in Youtube or any other website that uses ads. Offering customized "free samples" to entice me. I don't want them doing that to me and I can't make them not do that to me - only the government can.
So going back to my first question, which you didn't answer - what do you think the government should get involved with?
If we agree on that last point and you agree that gambling companies should exist and sane people who are well informed have the right to gamble at those places, then we agree on all important points.
> If you have food addiction, how should mcdonalds filter you out?
Debatable. Let's go back to this statistic:
- Approximately 25% of online gamblers are classified as problem gamblers based on clinical screening tools
That is not insignificant. I don't know how it is at McDonalds, but I doubt 25% of their customers are food addicts. What is a tolerable range? We do have rules and restrictions for alcoholic drinks and tobacco.
US gov exist to serve corporate, and their people let them do it