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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Why?

You haven't made any argument.

And lots of industries ban unprofitable customers. All-you-can-eat restaurants will ban customers who eat/take absurd amounts of food, which is unprofitable. Landlords don't rent to prospective tenants who have a history of not paying rent, which is unprofitable. Every major retailer will ban you if you return too many items too often, which is unprofitable.

So why would betting be any different? Banning highly unprofitable customers is normal business practice across many industries.

There's a reason we call it the free market rather than the forced market. Businesses aren't forced to transact with individuals (unless they are discriminating against specific protected classes like race or gender).

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I personally think if betting is allowed then they shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate. Same with my belief that Vegas casinos shouldn’t be allowed to ban card counters. This also naturally discourages predatory business models.

However aside from this, the data is over abundantly clear. Legalized betting significantly hurts the financial health of the places where it’s allowed; because of the rollout in the US, there’s so much data we can derive a definitive causative effect that bankruptcies are up and savings go down in places that legalize it. You can have a liberal view of “that’s their problem” but from a societal perspective this is a net societal harm that has no to minimal beneficial impact.

> I personally think if betting is allowed then they shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate.

Why? What makes betting different from every other business in this regard? Why the exception? On what principle?

The principle I’m generally in favor of “natural” consequences of actions being inescapable, for businesses and people, regardless of industry. The other principle is one of value creation being the only products that are allowed to be sold, particularly at scale on the broad market.

If you want to extract oil, you shouldn’t be able to escape the cost of climate change. Similarly, you shouldn’t get extra protection and subsidies from government to enable your business model and subsidies should be countered strongly with tariffs to ensure those subsidies aren’t skewing the global economy.

If you do sales of addictive products like alcohol, tobacco, or gambling you shouldn’t be able to offload the harm of that onto “personal responsibility”. Same goes with mobile phones and social media internationally trying to be addictive now that we understand this “attention grabbing” incentive really well.

And you can tell that gambling isn’t being an honest player because of the lip service these companies pay by claiming they ban people with legitimate gambling problems but the actual evidence is they don’t and instead actually treat these people like whales and keeping them engaged and only banning the people who aren’t costing them money.

But betting specifically is worse than alcohol in terms of destructiveness because the vast majority of people who engage with the product have a problem. At least the vast majority of people engage with alcohol without serious issues like that. And in terms of value creation, it s a cheap low value form of addictive entertainment at best, a step above slot machines. In the common case it’s harmful and the worst destructive.

PS: if you read what I wrote, I didn’t say that sports betting is the exception. Gambling like blackjack and banning card counters was similar.

You're arguing that gambling is bad and that externalities should be priced in.

Fine, but none of that has anything to do with why you think betting/gambling firms shouldn't be able to exclude highly unprofitable customers while basically every other industry can. That's the exception you seem to be calling for.

Can you give an example of other industries that are allowed to classify customers as “unprofitable” and exclude them?

And as a sibling noted, yes I think making that specific industry unprofitable is precisely how to resolve the problem of SCOTUS reversing a 26 year ban on the issue.

I gave three in my root comment. I'm not going to repeat myself.

And OK, if you want to ban gambling then argue for that. Don't argue for removing the freedom to choose who you do business with as a means to that. Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

If someone wants to ban an industry then making it less profitable is a step in the right direction.

Imagine an industry almost identical to gambling where the only difference is how payouts are calculated. Instead, all gambles return exactly the expected value rather than a payout based on random chance. Any of the "other" purposes of gambling like entertainment are just as well fulfilled by this as what we have today.

I suspect most people aren't interested in gambling this way though. Banning winners allows you to turn our gambling into something much closer to this alternate form, while keeping all the marketing benefits of a game people actually want to play. That certainly feels deceptive in ways that a transactional purchase is not.

I don’t disagree with your general idea, that companies will ban customers if they aren’t profitable. But these seem like sort of different examples…

> All-you-can-eat restaurants will ban customers who eat/take absurd amounts of food, which is unprofitable.

I like this example. It is simply not wanting to make a deal with the person. It seems pretty close to the betting situation.

> Landlords don't rent to prospective tenants who have a history of not paying rent, which is unprofitable.

This is different because the renter is specifically reneging on their side of the contract. It isn’t a matter of not wanting to do business with them because the deal has bad terms, but because the landlord has good reason to suspect they’ll actually be ripped off instead.

> Every major retailer will ban you if you return too many items too often, which is unprofitable.

This… I dunno. Making too many returns is not necessarily illegitimate or anything (somebody could just get unlucky and end up with a lot of bad products). But, it is a bad vibe, it feels like maybe the person is running some kind of scam or fraud that you just haven’t worked out the details of.

——

Another example we could add: if you have a some pickup or beer-league sports and for some reason a professional player shows up, and starts playing really competitively and flattening all the other players, you might ask them to not come back, simply to maintain a reasonable competitive landscape for everybody.

Because the loophole for sports betting is it’s a game of skill. If they are actively eliminating skilled players it’s no longer a game of skill, just pure predatory gambling.

Worse, it’s actively trying to exploit their customers through deception.

The whole idea of gambling is predicated on the idea that you can win. If winning can cause you to get banned, the premise of the business is a lie. It's basically false advertising, and these places should not be allowed to claim (or imply) you can win anything. Basically the only thing they should be able to advertise is that they will take your money.

Yup, you can say that this should signal to people that they shouldn’t participate in betting, but if they are still doing it willingly then what’s the problem?

Maybe divorce, crime, homelessness, bankruptcy, suicide, to name a few?

Plus, the innocent partner is now inheriting the debt, because that is how divorces work.

The defenders of predatory industries that threw huge money on A/B tests about how take advantage of people blaming everyone else are getting tired out.

So then should we ban anything that causes one of these things?

Anything is too strong, but everytime something is a cause we should look at that option along with others. I'm against divorce - but marriage to someone who is abusive is even worse and so I'm forced to allow for divorce despite being against it. There are many many other things in life that are far more complex (even my example is far more complex, but you wouldn't read the 100 volume books if I wrote it - I don't even have time to think about all the details that would need to be in it)

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