Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society
pewresearch.org
pewresearch.org
Gambling thrives in contexts where a ladder to success doesn’t exist or is perceived as not existing. If hard work or time doesn’t make your life better, then fate is just chance, and you might as well throw your money at something that has the possibility of making your rich, no matter how tiny that likelihood.
Kyla Scanlon (?) coined the term "financial nihilism" to describe this feeling:
* https://kyla.substack.com/p/gen-z-and-financial-nihilism
She thinks it's why things like cryptocurrencies/BTC have taken off: it's a chance to 'hit the jackpot', as many folks don't see another way to (financial) success.
The key is that in a well-functioning society and wisely-lived life, you don’t need to spend the cost on lottery because you can afford life/retirement without it’s winnings.
If your annual income is $N, missing out on a gain of $N is bad, but not nearly as bad a suffering a loss of $N.
Both cases (lottery and insurance) are paying an affordable amount of money for a chance to avoid complete financial ruin.
I recognize all the various societal and structural factors that disadvantage younger people. At the same time, people have agency. When I was in my early twenties (twenty years ago) my job was software development and my primary hobby was…software development. I was constantly improving my craft, primarily just because I loved it. Many of the people I worked with were the same.
It is, of course, not entirely fair to criticize younger people given that there are teams of psychologists working to make these products as addictive as possible. So perhaps we older people need to do something about it. Yes, I sound old AF: “kids, get off your phones and do something useful!” Yes, I say this to my own kids, with little discernible efficacy. But I honestly wonder what you all think of this. Do I have a point or is this just victim blaming?
The “screen” effect doesn’t exist. But the percentage of students enrolled in cs programs grew a lot of the last few years, and I’ve seen the passion difference have an effect. Two friends of mine graduated last year. Both had zero offers out of undergrad (this is the norm right now, again, completely irrelevant to screen time). One of them was passionate about coding and kept working on side projects/leetcoding, eventually landing a role at a tech company after a year of working at a boba shop. The other, who struggled with coding and was verbally not passionate about it (complained about it a lot, didn’t interview prep much) ended up throwing in the towel a few months on the job hunt.
An anecdote, but probably generalizable across those in today’s job market. But the market is the core problem, second to the individual’s willingness to grind. Neither are related to screen time.
This times a thousand. I wouldn't have the jobs I do today if I didn't spend probably on balance an unhealthy amount of time in front of my own screens in the 90's. I got into programming because I loved screens and wanted to make them show me different things.
The difference today is two-fold IMO:
* The job market, as stated, is shit, especially for tech right now. For decades kiddos have been propagandized into going into a future in comp science of varying depths and qualities, both here in the US, and overseas. We have more tech workers than ever, wages are falling because of over-supply, and too many are focused on niche framework technologies who's skills don't translate well across the wide breadth of what's actually used in industry. Example: my company is hiring right now and it's DIRE to try and find mobile developers who actually develop in Kotlin/Java/Swift/Objective-C. I'm drowning in resumes for React developers but we don't use any of that and have no desire to.
* The screens now used by would-be budding hackers are locked down to hell and back, and were put in their hands when they were likely still shitting in their pants (no judgement of course, we all did it for awhile) and they don't conceive of them as "machines I could play with" but instead, simply as a never ending font of distraction and entertainment, perfectly curated to their individual desires.
You spend more energy than ever making less money than ever and probably under more stress than ever over all the looming costs. That's not a state of mind where you just sit down at the end of the day and start working on your side project. Anyone who can do that is extraordinary, but I hope that isn't how we expect our future generations to operate.
I would bond with them through this shared hobby, make acquaintances, even friends, people who you could recognise even if it was just a nickname.
My first real software development job was through friends I met on IRC and forums, they knew me for years, and offered me an internship after we had worked on a hobby project for a Ultima Online game server.
Fast-forward to now, it is really hard for young people to find shared spaces with a sense of community, in the real world or online. Everything they experience online is through mass platforms where everyone is basically anonymous even though it became much more common to share your real name. How can you bond with someone in the comments section of a YouTube video about your hobby? Or in the comments of some TikTok/Instagram post that was quite interesting? You simply can't, that post or video will disappear from others' feeds, there's no sense of permanence of the members of a community.
I think the closest to this experience might be some Discord servers, it's one of the ways I found to try to meet people on my current hobbies but the experience is still very different than the tight-knitted groups of IRC channels from the past. Forums, for the most part, were eaten by reddit, for some hobbies there are still quite a few active ones but the discoverability is much worse, you will have to jump through some hoops (usually starting on a subreddit) to find one of those.
My feeling is just that community in general is in decline, I'm lucky to have managed to keep finding these bubbles and sticking with them, online or in the real world, but when I talk to my colleagues in the 20-24 age bracket I sense they simply don't have communities. They have a few friends who they might meet for a shared activity but they generally don't know a place where they can go and meet other similarly-minded folks.
The screens end up as a bad refuge to try to find these connections that were much more natural when we were young.
And sadly even this diminished engagement you are talking about is somewhat optimistic in that it assumes the people they are interacting with on mass platforms are even real people, which is increasingly not the case.
To put context on your 'Gen Z' assertion, as of Q3 2023, the average global screen time is approximately 6 hours and 40 minutes per day for users aged 16 to 64 - with most of that wholly attributable is due to a shift in the consumption from legacy to digital media, rather than an across the board increase in consumption.
The percentage of 12th graders who read a book or a magazine every day declined from 60% in the late 1970s to 16% by 2016, and 8th graders spent almost an hour less time watching TV in 2016 compared with the early 1990s. Trends were fairly uniform across gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/ppm-ppm0000203.pd...
In the grand scheme of things, the Victorian invention of 'childhood' has been effectively pushed up to about 21-25 in most of the Western World as a consequence of ladder-pulling and the increasing training necessary for the Information Economy. It's a societal rather than a generational thing reinforced from multiple angles.
Conversely, its the digital natives keeping boomer companies alive in the *aaS era. The hardships younger people face economically are almost entirely due to the collapse of any semblance of trade unionism or collective bargaining in the information and tech economies, combined with a cost of living crisis predicated on predatory housing policies.
Blaming screen-time is just a digital avocado-toast argument; trivialising the fact that this is the first set of generations to arguably have it worse off than their parents from an equality of outcome perspective, and attributing it to a problem of digital self-indulgence on the part of the youth.
Screens have had an impact in that they make entertainment more available and accessible on a moment's notice, and types of screen activity do, I believe, impact attention spans. That said, prior to television, humanity was still pretty good at finding ways to escape or entertain themselves, particularly in hard times.
A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B
so the nihilism is real and warranted, if they don't inherit at least a downpayment for a house from you while you are still alive, the jobs available - even for highly pedigreed people - don't provide the income for the downpayment, for the most part. they would need arbitrage with high paying work in a very low cost of living place, for a long time, or the same but coupled with a socioeconomic equal who also doesn't want any gaps in their high income employment.
many new-money parents want their children to prove... something... related to income and autonomy, which puts inheritance while living into "entitled handout" territory, instead of practical. while due to lifespan, any inheritance will only reach the child when the child is 60+ years old, where its impact to the utility and direction of their life is nullified, and it's just bean counting for the mere concept of "keeping money in the family" but doesn't give anyone a leg up in social status, partner selection, even where you own children's children go to school.
(note: if you actually are not confident in your retirement income and end of life care costs, then you are not parent this applies to. for parents sitting on big wins in real estate and other capital, it does.)
but the financial reality doesn't really support this slower moving culture. the share of people in the US that are both homeowners and married by age 30 has fallen to nearly single digits percents. Aside from marriage being less attractive too, many delay everything related due to being preoccupied with meager work and financial instability.
now that being said, the thing you are more familiar with, hustle, does still work. pumping earnings into an investment property somewhere less expensive does still work, only suboptimal because they would still need to be paying rent in the higher cost of living area. what's different is that burnout is just not valued any more. hustle culture itself is not valued, its nothing to brag about and a silent path one might pursue. while experiences are valued. entire generations of people watched gen-x and boomers delay gratification and saw their bodies fail by the time they reached the finish line. its seen as a cautionary tale, not discipline.
so yes, lots of people overcorrect into a defeatist attitude, but the incentives support it. normal jobs won't get them anywhere, high paying jobs also won't get them anywhere, the training for high paying jobs doesn't guarantee a high paying job either.
That said, what I see in young people around me (because of my age, there’s quite a few) is a lot of addiction, not nihilism. These are kids with opportunities based on their socioeconomic status and yet many are just wasting huge amounts of time. The underlying question behind my post is essentially, does Cal Newport’s theory of success - so good they can’t ignore you - hold? And what happens to society when a generation is sucked into what they themselves literally refer to as “brain rot”?
> is this just victim blaming?
seems like you answered your own question
So... you spent a lot of time in front of a screen, huh?
For genZ, the squeeze comes from 3 sides. On one side, few professions promise long term stability. There is a feeling that the ground can vanish under your feet at any moment. (SWE jobs in particular are feeling this pressure). 2nd, Social media has raised the goalposts on the idea of a good life. Lastly, Nimbys and opaque healthcare policy have put the lowest (and most quantifiable) aspects of Maslow's pyramid out of reach. (Safety needs)
Gambling is a symptom. Nowdays, people don't invest in good bonds because there is no such thing. Similarly, people don't invest in steady jobs because increasingly, there is no such thing.
Housing reform, transparent healthcare and a small degree of worker protections would go a long way towards incentivizing stable decision making.
A lot of people online took the opportunity to criticize zoomers as out of touch and financially illiterate, but I think most people under 30 have looked at the trends over their lifetime and determined that their lives are going to have so much volatility they need a massive amount of money to weather the storm.
[1] https://fortune.com/2025/01/20/gen-z-9-5-million-financially...
And to be fair, my expenditures are very small compared to most others. No loans, no major medical issues, single person living alone. Having a family easily triples this number and we get right on that 10m figure.
The incomes are still wonky, though. I don't know how financial success is double, but income demands are tripled.
Ah, so they are just basing their life decisions on falsehoods then? lol
I know the world is different now, but I graduated high school in the wake of the 08 financial crisis. A lot of this Zoomer doomerism sounds like what people said about millennials.
But I (and my future wife) just went to a state school with in-state tuition. Got tech/eng degrees with some debt (5 figures). Have worked in the industry with ups and downs (including layoffs) for a decade or so now. Paid that debt off. Lived in a high CoL city in a nice apartment. Got a nice house after 5y of saving (but not being super frugal, just savvy I'd say. e.g. drove the same 08 Civic the whole time). And now we have a baby and only one of us works at all (and the other WFHs).
We didn't get giant donations from our parents (although some reasonable college savings helped, which I am repeating for my kid). Didn't go to prestigious fancy schools. Didn't even exceptionally excel in school.
But the key was to not throw our hands up and say the system is fucked. It's waxed and waned since that 08 crisis, and not participating is the main way to have lost. So yeah, thinking insanely wrong stuff like you need 10 mil to succeed is just stupid and self sabotaging haha.
I'm not sure that it's an accurate view of reality this time. And to be clear I'm older than you, so this isn't me being a doomer and throwing my hands in the air about my own future. This is me noticing that if I myself can't afford a house in my city, how is the younger generation supposed to do it? They simply can't, not after only 5yrs of savings at least. Not even if they cut down on avocado toasts.
Also, just speaking about your anecdote, let me add my own. I am also doing fine. Not particularly rich but middle class, good income, and savings for retirement. But I just got hit with compounding dental issues, which despite having the most expensive health insurance from my company that's well known for providing excellent employee benefits, it will end up costing me at least 20k out of pocket, potentially going up to 30-40k due to the need for multiple surgical procedures.
And fortunately we can manage it, but if the same issue had happened to me 5 years ago, I would basically be at the edge of my savings where even a minor unexpected cost would have put me in terrible shape, and 10 years ago I may have had to declare bankruptcy, or more likely, do without either suffering in pain, or pushing off the problem to be handled by even more expensive work a few years down the line, taking on expensive debt, or setting myself up for periodontal disease which leads to a whole host of issues including significantly increased risk of dementia.
Even if one is earning and saving decently, the precariousness of life in the US of A today is incredible.
you need to clear 1-2m for that house by itself in any mid-high COL area right now.You need another 1-2m in 18 years to take care of your kids (they can live on less, but is that "successful"?). In 20 years we're already talking about 3-4m dollars before we even dive into the other bills and emergencies to address.
We have to remember that "financially successful" isn't some precise term. Some may treat "able to eat food and keep a roof over head" as successful, where others may see "can raise a healthy family" as so.
For a current 20 to 30 year old, they should expect SS benefits to come at a higher age, probably 72 or even 75, and whatever benefit amount they get will buy less than what it buys today. And they will have to shell out for better quality healthcare (i.e. a couple decades ago, they might have seen a doctor, but today, they see an NP/PA, and in a few more decades, they might not even get that).
The big expense is insuring against loss of income between age 50 and whatever age government benefits start. Most people will never make their way up the income ladder again, so they need to make sure they have adequate savings by then, otherwise they are cooked, and those are the ages that healthcare expenses start adding up.
Try it some time and people watch. At best, there's groups of people having a good time. Usually they seemed to be associated with music or convention activity. Mostly, it's depressing, with old people blowing their pensions on stupid slot machines. At worst, there's really obvious criminal activity with people washing money on table and poker games.
The only gambling thing that I ever thought could be good was the state lottery bonds they have in the UK and Ireland. Basically, it's like a CD for lottery... you the interest is a prize pot. But your principal is still there.
The online sports betting thing is gross. My son is 13, and many of the boys are totally enthralled with sports betting. We're creating addicts before they even earn money.
Interestingly, considering the role that sports have in day to day social discourse & self-identity with teams (“we” need to win this game), I’ve heard a few acquaintances say basically “placing a bet makes watching it more interesting, it’s too boring otherwise”. And given the social/identity thing you can’t not watch it. “Hey you catch that play last night? ‘We’ fell apart, awful…” gotta be able to keep up with the tribe chants.
I'm sure many parents place proxy sports bets for their kids. Maybe to teach them how to use betting as a form of entertainment and learning how your money can also just disappear. I can see it being a good thing if done carefully. I can also see it going wrong.
to which I've always responded, "How would that make it interesting?"
1. You buy an event pass
2. The event pass contains a "coin" that can be upgraded, and grants access to a "pick 'em" interface
3. Based on the outcomes of the matches and your picks, the coin is upgraded
4. The upgraded coin allows access to "souvenir packages"
5. The "souvenir packages" and their contents (rare and/or unique weapon skins) can be traded on Steam's marketplace for store credit or currency
At least one kid I know has a Sportsbook app on his phone setup by his parents.
Nope. 99% slovenly dressed elderly banging lifelessly away at slots. The other 1% lonely, middle aged men.
In the author’s words, long degeneracy represents “a belief that the world will only get more degenerate, financialized, speculative, lonely, tribal and weird”.
The most concise and holistic explanation of this trend is:
"As real returns compress, risk increases to compensate".
Which is important because it yields completely different behavior from the believer...
the core issue is that such possibility does not exist. if you are successful gambler to the point where you are on the path to riches you will be banned from all platforms faster than Jets are mathematically eliminated from the playoffs
These things are so unfathomably antisocial that I earnestly believe every single politician who advances them should be (journalistically) investigated as extensively as is legally possible.
What kind of markets is this referring to?
Polymarket still charges 0 fees. While Kalshi's fees+spread can approach or even exceed traditional sportsbooks on some markets, neither of them have any interest in banning winning players, as they don't take a side on any bet and directly benefit from more betting activity. Kalshi also pays interest on bets, which can add up on longer term positions.
Betfair has operated with a similar model for decades in the UK and elsewhere.
The addicts and lonely line up waiting for these places to open, they spend everything they've got and the gambling places encourage it by providing them with free coffee, snacks and in some cases dinner.
No, gambling isn't immoral, but praying on the addicts, the mentally challenge and the lonely is. If you can't stay in business without exploiting the weak, you have no right to exist. The only negative consequence I see from banning gambling is the potential dangers of a black market.
> Although the bible does not condemn gambling, instead the desire to get rich is called to account numerous times in the New Testament.
And the Catholic's problem with it is the competition:
> Some parish pastors have also opposed casinos for the additional reason that they would take customers away from church bingo and annual festivals where games such as blackjack, roulette, craps, and poker are used for fundraising.
The Catholic Church holds the position that there is no moral impediment to gambling, so long as it is fair, all bettors have a reasonable chance of winning, there is no fraud involved, and the parties involved do not have actual knowledge of the outcome of the bet (unless they have disclosed this knowledge),[33] and as long as the following conditions are met: the gambler can afford to lose the bet, and stops when the limit is reached, and the motivation is entertainment and not personal gain leading to the "love of money"[34] or making a living.
In general, Catholic bishops have opposed casino gambling on the grounds that it too often tempts people into problem gambling or addiction, and has particularly negative effects on poor people; they sometimes also cite secondary effects such as increases in loan sharking, prostitution, corruption, and general public immorality
Though this is conflating correlation for causation. As you note yourself in GP, dire social conditions is what makes people see gambling (or risk-taking more generally) as one of the only viable options to get out.
In drug rehabilitation, the phrase is no longer used. Instead people have a bingo card of disease, conditions and syndromes to go with addiction. Once people have been pigeon-holed in a dozen ways then the die is cast, these conditions are no longer imaginary, you have to hold yourself up in life because X, Y and Z prohibit you from even giving it a go.
Regarding the article, I detest organised gambling, however, relatively few chronic gamblers end up homeless and destitute. You need a good dose of class A drugs and a smorgasbord of childhood trauma to guarantee the truly negative outcomes.
I don't object to gambling amongst friends, even if it is on a card game. I might bet someone that they can't beat me on Scrabble, but I would be getting the dopamine hits from laying some massive, high-scoring words on the board to devastate my fellow players, but winning that £10 just ups the stakes and my competitive drive. If I am just betting on a sport (or even a Scrabble game) played by others, then it isn't quite the same.
What does amaze me about modern day gambling is that you know it is rigged. I don't trust an app to honestly flip a coin for me. My version of the app would be 'if heads show tails and vice-versa most of the time'. Yet people pour their life savings and some more into apps that are black boxes with no way of peeking inside to see how it works. The seasoned gambler must know that every game is rigged and that the house always wins, but they still queue up for another spin.
They rank up unpayable debts and their married partners end up being legally obligated to pay half of that even after divorce.
Getting life together after gambling is super hard to impossible. It is literally easier to get back on track as alcoholic, as those have much smaller debts.
And it is easier to avoid keep alcohol out of house then ... cell phone put of house.
Games of chance and friendly wagers amongst friends may not, in themselves be immoral or harmful but gambling as an organized business activity is absolutely harmful
I personally don’t see the argument for categorising it as immoral on the basis that’s it’s not useful. The same could be said about plenty of other enjoyable things.
However exploitation is clearly immoral. That’s where I have issue with gambling. Gambling operators don’t get rich thanks to the average users but because addicts give them much more than they should. That’s clearly immoral be it from a casino, a gambling website, or micro transactions in mobile game. Every companies which profit from that should be held accountable including Apple and Google which are clearly complicit.
Cocaine also gives one pleasure when taking it, but at some point the enjoyable part is surrounding by suffering.
I do not concur on the dopamine argument. There's no solid evidence for it. The underlying mechanism is probably much more complex. But since we're not discussing a signal path to addiction, it's an unnecessary complication of the argument that instills the belief that there's a medical cure.
Addiction breaks social ties. For example, when an addict starts to struggle to continue to pay for his addiction, he often starts to steal from friends and family members.
The average view on this on HN is quite different from the American average. Personality psychologists have observed that people who do well in software development and entrepreneurship tend to be high in a trait called "openness to experience". Maybe HNers are more tolerant of addictive substances and activities than the American average because addictive substances and activities tend to be interesting experiences.
(I am restricting my universe of discourse here to the US only because it is the country I know best.)
- Insurance prevents financial catastrophe by aggregating risk, yet it is nothing more than wagering you'll get into trouble.
- Market liquidity is provided by people willing to bet on price developments, which smoothes out fluctuations in availability.
- Large infrastructure projects and charity donations been financed through lotteries -- it's a way to raise money without a guarantee of return.
- If you want to sell something which a single buyer cannot afford, and it is difficult to share, it can be sold through a lottery which lets buyers buy a ticket's expected value rather than the full cost of the thing.
These benefits still exist when unregulated, but of course it seems to work even better under the appropriate regulation.
- Infrastructure is better off paid by taxation. That's much fairer, and more predictable.
- I don't see insurance as gambling. It has a chance element, but that's not enough to qualify something as gambling. You buy security against large losses at a moderate price (*), instead of building up large losses for nothing. It's also a step which you hope doesn't pay out (sickness, fire, theft).
- Selling through lottery is exploitation.
(*) YMMV
This is a neat moral message… but is it really true? Gambling is addictive, so the reality might be that even without such deep social problems you get similar levels
TLDR I don't know how you write a law that would put hard and fast limits on what can be bet on and how much an individual is allowed to bet during a week in a way that would be palatable to the companies. I'm in favor of the blanket ban at this point; the black market for betting has always existed and it was better than the current setup.
I believe that there's a place for a time-efficient, minimal human approval, risk-reward system for a society in which jobs have been gatekept to ever-higher requirements and are even harder to sustain due to pressures of the people gatekeeping you out and around you once you've gotten in (ie. the bureaucracies of your co-workers and your boss's temper tantrums).
If you've ever talked to creative-passion professionals(ie. media-content, artists), clients don't really respect them and abuse their passion, plus the people around them put a lot of pressure on them. In addition, polishing their work takes up a lot of time. So it's highly probable that they would be stuck in this loop if they didn't do something.
You could say 'oh, they can upskill themselves' or whatever. However that carries significant risk and still binds the individual to people's approvals and their hidden/overboard requirements. All the while, time and mental health is being sapped from them. I knew a programmer in gamedev who pivoted to robotics. It was all math heavy stuff and consumed him and his mental health to the point of his relationships suffering.
Point is skills-pivoting is hard to execute, and gets riskier by the day (think ai and jobs). However, say there's a system that is easy to execute, but the rewards are variant. But if that individual is able to figure out a plan to generate positive expectancy, that's a great alternative to the system of 'get a job and another job and hope you tick the requirements'. It's like a business in which you fail until you don't.
Of course, the keyword is being able to turn whatever you're doing into *positive expectancy*. Like a business with a new offering/venture, everything new looks like a gamble because you don't know the information, the theories and the outcome. Do you want really want to kill off these new businesses?
I agree with the premise, however, in actuality gambling systems are almost all designed to just extract money from people. Not function as a wealth redistribution system.
Take daytrading for example, of the 99% who fail are they all gamblers or are they just tolerating enough failures until they get a positive expectancy?
> however, in actuality gambling systems are almost all designed to just extract money from people. Not function as a wealth redistribution system.
Yea what I'm talking about isn't exactly a gambling system which will try to screw you over the instant you get some momentum of out a positive expectancy system.
I think casinos do the same thing..
Broadly speaking I probably agree with their conclusion. But they really should consider savings and investment before donating their money to a betting website - it is pretty much the only choice that is guaranteed to not make their lives better in any way. I can hazard a guess as to the major reason their life isn't improving, they aren't doing anything to make it better. The money supply generally grows at >5% annually in most English speaking countries, find a way to get a slice of that action if nothing else.
If they really can't think of something to do with the money, give it to a friend. Then at least maybe there is some social capital for a rainy day.
This is especially noticeable with "traditional" offline gambling and lotteries - lower income people play them habitually from a kind of learned helplessness, not as a rational financial strategy.
https://fortune.com/2024/04/04/lottery-tickets-poor-rich-inc...
Thread ancestor was saying "Gambling thrives in contexts where a ladder to success doesn’t exist or is perceived as not existing". And I think that the problem here is that the people involved couldn't climb the ladder if you put their hands on it. To climb the ladder of success requires the grip of a rational actor. If someone is gambling then the #1 problem is not the system in itself, but the fact that for whatever reason they don't understand the concept of investment at a fundamental level. Can't help that person by changing gambling policies around. If they aren't going to invest themselves, then at the end of the day they are always going to be dependent on the charity of someone who will, whether they irrationally waste their money on gambling or some other vice.
You are not saving up to improve your life because the savings rate is too small to effectively matter. And all the savings you muster can be wiped out by, well, any extra expense. Car breaks down, medical copay, kid needs clothes due to a growth spurt, bank fees, etc.
If any chance event will break you, it is not entirely illogical to lean on chance to save you.
If you don't see light at the end of the tunnel, or you think that light is an oncoming train, you are not going to "act rationally" for arriving at the end of the tunnel.
I'm sorry but this comment is so out of touch with how poor people (or even people in general) actually function, I don't know what else to say.
The solution is enabling hope. Your solution is to ignore that entire aspect and accept they have no hope and to be more pragmatic with their money.
It is like telling a depressed person they should try being happy.
I don't think anyone is getting rich from sports betting. It's not like the lottery, where the jackpots are massive and the odds are very long. And the jackpots get massive in the lottery because they accumulate when nobody wins, whereas in sports bettings, the gambler always either wins or loses, based on the outcome of the sporting event; there's no carry-over.
And also, of course: there are gangs influencing the outcomes of the sport events and selling the bets or organizing betting on them. Fraudster bosses, if they are smart, are absolutely getting rich. And betting company owners too. But you didn't mean those.
This is highly unlikely. Nobody has the magical ability to predict the outcome of sporting events.
> there are gangs influencing the outcomes of the sport events and selling the bets or organizing betting on them. Fraudster bosses, if they are smart, are absolutely getting rich.
This is highly unlikely for most of the things that Americans are gambling on, such as NFL games.
> But you didn't mean those.
It doesn't appear to be what the OP meant.
It is my experience from working in the sports betting industry for several years, including the risk reporting and risk managing part. In fact I'm pretty sure several people lived comfortable life by going around our risk management by using a loophole that was possible at the time in our country - it was possible to bet anonymously in person. So while we could limit maximum winnings per bet, we could not tie particular bets to persons, and they just placed several bets in different locations, or they used helpers.
I'm not going into speculations how they acquired the knowledge. Some people are just nerds, others sit at the stadiums and place bets right from there etc., but I'm pretty confident there are customers who are able to make money on sport bets and are not fraudsters.
I'm not sure if you'd discount that as obviously thats completely different than 1 person sitting in their bedroom placing bets but just thought I'd raise it incase this level of sports betting interests you.
From what I understand they place their bets in Asian markets rather than the markets consumers in the west would.
I think this passes the buck. It's not the addictive apps and ads, it's society! Don't regulate us!
Cryptocurrencies also partially fit this category being semi-pyramid schemes, but have intrinsic advantages to hide criminal activity and for tax evasion in addition to their privacy-protecting properties for legitimate transactions.
On the contrary all epicenters of gambling are extremely rich areas populated by people who have mastered such art.
The proximities of the stock exchanges of every country are basically the richest zip code in the country
This does not seem to be a rebuttal. The “extremely rich areas” are generally funded by the not at all rich who lose their money gambling.
Additionally most in the “extremely rich areas” are not actually wealthy. And there are many, many gambling areas that are not rich at all.
But just to say, having been a sports fan my entire life, as well as growing up with a grandmother that lived in Vegas, I bet a tiny bit myself but knew quite a few who bet a lot more, and it wasn't really like you're saying. Nobody expected to get rich. Hitting it big enough to make a meaningful impact on lifetime wealth requires parlays that are statistically just as unlikely as the actual lottery, at which point you may as well simply play the lottery, which was already available.
Instead, sports bettors seemed to come in a few varieties. One is the analytically minded fans who just wanted to see if they could make some amount of predictable extra income. I fell into that category back in college and grad school and did consistently earn money, but a very small amount, in the four figures a year, less than you'd get working part-time at McDonald's. Another is the casual fan who just finds the games more entertaining if they have a personal stake. These are the kinds of people who participate in office super bowl pools and it's pretty innocuous.
The problems start to happen when people from either of these groups has some kind of unforeseen financial problem, no other way to get money quickly, and figures they'll try something like throwing a bunch of money into a boxing match they think they can predict. Not get rich levels, but something like betting enough to hit a 50 grand payoff. It becomes a problem because one of two things happens. You succeed, but then you can't acknowledge the role of sheer luck, think you're smarter than you really are and can predict the future, and you keep doing it. Otherwise, you lose, but can't let it go and chase your losses to try and recoup them. Either way, you end up losing. The only way to win is get very lucky and then have the discipline to immediately quit, which almost no one has.
But realistically, people have bet on sports as long as sports have existed, in every civilization we have a record of. It's hard to say it's reflective of any kind of specific social condition. It's a natural thing to do. Most bets are small and effectively just people throwing away money on a pointless purchase no more harmful than buying junk on Amazon they don't really need and will never use. It's becoming a problem because legalizing it gave the sports leagues and broadcasters themselves a financial incentive to market it. Every game and every analysis now includes ads and the pundits themselves giving their picks, making it appear to be an important part of being a fan than everyone should do. They took something that could have mostly been harmless and industrialized it. A whole lot of people who easily get addicted to anything addictive are now specifically getting addicted to this, simply because they can. It's problematic in exactly the same way alcohol sales are. The marketing industrial complex is making it seem like you're not a full human if you're not doing it, but if everyone is doing it, then the addicts are going to be doing it, too. At a small enough scale, it's still destroying a few lives, but it's like hoarding, rare and most people vaguely know it's out there somewhere but never think about it. If the most popular entertainers in the world, emblems of civic pride and identity, started running ads and on-air segments telling you that you should hoard and exactly how to do it, then we'd have a much larger scale problem.
The problem we have as a country, though, is the court logic legalizing it couldn't have realistically been different. There is no sane way to justify having it be legal in Nevada but nowhere else. It should be legal nowhere, but then you're banning Las Vegas, and even if that's the right thing to do, we don't have a ton of precedent for doing that much harm to corporate bottom lines. It took 50 years of incontrovertible evidence to do it to tobacco. It'll probably happen eventually, but in the same way. We won't outright ban betting, but it will be heavily marketed against, socially stigmatized, and banned from advertising.
Hard work doesn't make you rich, but it's part of the things that you need to prosper. I'm no inspirational poster child, but hard work, building a network, doing good things for people were all essential to my long term success. I didn't have the benefit of familial connections, but that helps too. There's a saying that you make your own luck, which is true... if you're not on the field, you can't get lucky.
People making a living playing poker is fine, but it's just like being a working musician, an investor or an athlete. I had a friend who made a living on horse better. You've developed a set of skills and have a usually limited window to cash in on them. The 95% of people gambling aren't attracted to the game of skill, and flop around with the 101 things to do in a gambling establishment that aren't poker.
I guess people win the lottery too. Life is complex, there’s no one answer. And tbh, if I reflect on my own life, my comp is much higher than it has ever been, my peeps are very happy, and I’m not grinding by any means.
Pun intended.
> We already live in a country
Since 4-5 years ago I started to notice these betting houses cropping up where my family and friends live. They are impossible to miss, with big pictures of different sports and no windows.
The most important thing to notice is where these place are and are not. They proliferate in working class and less well off neighborhoods, while they tend to be absent from more affluent ones.
These places get a lot of foot traffic, all the locals barely making ends meet, blowing a few tens of euros here and there, with the eventual payoff. It's not difficult to hear stories of people getting into the deep end and developing a real addiction with devastating consequences.
And it's not only the business itself, but what they attract. All sort of sketchy characters frequent these places, and tend to attract drugs, violence...
Legal or not these places make the communities they inhabit worse, not better. I personally would be very happy if family didn't have to live exposed to them.
It’s not that they don’t want to be, it’s that affluent neighborhoods tend to keep things that are considered “low class” out of them. The only Safeway in my city that doesn’t sell lottery tickets is the one in the most affluent neighborhood.
Now day-trading? I consider that gambling, because any particular day’s price movement is a lot closer to random.
Most can avoid to lose completely while alive, but they have no path to a winning position, and others are trapped in a situation where it's so hard to go down to a net lost that they lose ability to understand that individual hard work and wiseness is not going to defeat societal asymetries.
Much less. Something I’ve noticed is the parents of the wealthy teaching their children to invest versus e.g. day trade. In middle class or poor households, on the other hand, it’s not uncommon for the kid to be trading crypto instead.
Can you lose money in both absolutely but only actual investments have historically positive expectations. The stock market has had net growth of 7%+ on average in the last 100 years. Gambling has not increased the gamblers pockets at all its only shrunk there pockets
Gambling is basically redistributing money according to a random numbers generator, It's a negative sum game (because the house takes its fee), but a surprise positive spike game. That spike forms an addiction in the less fortunate.
Which make it no diffetent for average Joe than gambling.
Does the affluent community prohibit it or is Safeway self-policing?
Anyway, it's like making money off other human deficiencies, say, poor vision or dyslexia, and mistakes made due to those. It feels unfair, it does not feel like a conscious choice. Hence the understandable backlash.
Being able to gamble privately, 24/7, with all the psychological/engagement "optimizations" is even more insidious.
I was already expecting a lot of gambling site ads, they took over the soccer tournament sponsorships almost completely anyway.
But what I found out when I came back in the last 3-4 years 100% shocked me. It wasn't just TV and soccer teams, I saw gambling ads in napkin holders at some restaurants, bus stops. I went to get a haircut and the barbershop had TV with gambling ads adorning their frames.
Gambling is emphasized above to emphasize we are talking about individuals who are not sufficiently skilled to argue they are not essentially partaking in pure games of chance.
Most individuals are going up against these very sophisticated statistical models created by teams of quants working with huge datasets that you have to pay substantial amounts to access. I think most bettors don't know what they're up against.
And the bookie business model is intrinsically anti-consumer: if you win too much then the bookies will ban you. Whereas bookies are quite happy to keep taking money from addicts even when said addicts have already lost their life savings.
There are two things you might do as a bookmaker:
(1) Perceive the truth of who is likely to do what, and set odds reflecting that perfect Platonic reality, but with a percentage taken off for yourself.
(2) Adjust the odds you offer over time such that, come the event, the amount you stand to collect on either side will cover the amount you owe to the other side.
You don't need to know the odds to use strategy (2). Nor do you need to reject bettors who are likely to be right.
Neither does smoking, but we still limit the types of advertisements cigarette companies can make.
Gambling is ultimately a predatory business that serves to separate people susceptible to addiction from their money.
It absolutely does, and the number of people that died from second hand smoke is awful.
It doesn't make sport gambling adverts right, but it wasn't a great example.
I’m sure there is an argument there somewhere, and I’d love to address that if you would care to give it another go.
Gamblers have lost their homes as a result of their addiction, I think that impact on their families counts for something.
I.e., no. It counts for nothing.
Gambling between people, a basement poker game, that's fine, that's no one's business.
Handing your money over to rich people operating black boxes that are designed from ground up to mesmerize and mind control you into emptying your wallet is a totally other story. On the individual level, it ruins the lives of anyone who is unable to resist or understand the psychological tricks employed on them. Zooming out, it destroys families, communities and in effect, societies.
If we are going to base the legality of gambling on consent and human rights, we have to recognize the limit where consent is no longer valid, due to sickening engagement tactics.
Someone's freedom to make money off of my ignorance or weakness does not supersede my right to self-determination and well-being, neither of which are possible when being hoodwinked by exploitative capitalists.
If we are to continue allowing corporate gambling operations and 24/7 mobile sports betting, we need to place serious restrictions on how these companies are allowed to operate.
Which is what we should be doing with gambling: no advertising, as opposed to now where everybody ad break has a celebrity endorsing the intelligence you clearly have when you choose (betting platform).
To your implied point, drug addictions similarly ravish communities, destroy lives, and in the case of drugs like fentanyl, legalization effectively makes it easy to acquire extremely potent and discreet poisons, which has a huge potential impact for violence.
We can paint a similar story for gun violence. We can tie drugs, gambling and guns together even more tightly when we look into where cities approve permits for gambling centers, where most liquor stores pop up, selective enforcement and scandals like the Iran-Contra affair [0].
It's important to have a consistent position on all of these topics, so I thank you for raising this point. So all of that said, I think drug consumption/manufacturing/distribution, guns and gambling should generally all be legal at a high level, but we must dispense with the racist and classist implementations of these systems within our societies, and we should have sensible evaluation and certification programs in place for access to different stratifications.
You should be required to periodically prove medical and psychological fitness, as well as operational certification, for certain powerful substances. Similarly, we need sensible restrictions on gambling and guns [1].
The reality is that with freedom comes responsibility. Without responsibility, unrestricted freedom leads to anarchy or a post-capitalist nightmare. One of the main points of government is to balance these freedoms across individuals, communities and society at large, in order to maximize the well-being and self-determination of the people, while allowing for progress and innovation.
I'm curious to hear your own position.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
[1] To be clear, I am very pro 2nd amendment [1] and am not calling for a ban on anything or for the State to maintain a monopoly on violence and power.
"Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary" - Karl Marx
If that is not intentional (which I suspect it is not, so no offense intended), then I believe a quick search on “God-given rights” should help you make whatever case you want to in a logically consistent manner. It is a well-defined concept that has a specific meaning over a specific domain. I get the feeling “negative rights vs. positive rights” might be a useful search phrase as well.
Anyway, you said your argument accounts for it, but didn't actually follow through and demonstrate why that is. How does your argument take into account the aforementioned power imbalances?
Imagine you’re a loan shark. Which of the following seems like a good place to look for customers: upscale restaurant, movie theater, random bar, theme park, baseball stadium, city park, or a sports betting venue.
https://robbreport.com/style/watch-collector/luxury-watch-th...
Discussion 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45432627
Since you would be extremely off-topic if you tried to extend this argument to, e.g., Daniel Negreanu engaging in a game of poker, I wanted to explicitly preclude individuals competently engaging in whatever activity is being deemed 'problematic.'
It was mostly to help the 'other side' stay on topic; otherwise, I could trivially refute their arguments by counterexamples, e.g., Daniel Negreanu.
Let's start with the obvious- in all forms of gambling the gamblers make a net loss. The games are hosted by very sophisticated companies, that have better mathematicians, and make money.
$x is pumped into the system by the punters, $y is extracted, $z is returned. The 'house' is the only winner.
All those TV ads you see? Funded by losers.
Is it light entertainment? Similar to the cost of a ticket to the game? For some sure. But we understand the chemistry of gambling- it's addictive and compulsive.
If we agree it's generally bad, then what? Lots of things are known to be bad, but are still allowed (smoking and drinking spring to mind, nevermind sugar.)
It could be banned. Would that stop it? Probably not. Perhaps ban advertising? Perhaps tax gambling companies way higher (like we do with booze and smokes.) Perhaps treat it as a serious issue?
All of which is unlikely in the US. Business rules, and sports gambling us really good business.
Was not that big of a thing 15 years ago. The goal of a ban is not to reduce the consumption to 0, but try to lower it a significant amount. Although, since people are generally aware of it and participated in it, it might not be that easy to go back to beforetimes.
Oh, it's worse than that. In sports betting at least, if the gambler consistently makes money, the companies will ban or limit their gains. It's a scam.
Absolutely asinine statement. Yeah no shit it's not going to deter the most degenerate of gamblers of seeking out a place to make bets. Will it stop apps being advertised on TV and the app stores from grooming new people into it? Yes. Will it stop people mildly curious from betting on sports? Yes.
If "it" in "stop it" is "all sports betting" then no, obviously. If "it" is "sports betting in normal society" then yep, it will stop it. Anyone obfuscating this simple fact wants to make money off of more human misery, remember that.
Remind me of how cigarette usage has gone in nations that ban advertisement of it.
When gambler makes debt, then the partner gets half the debt in divorce. And they have to pay it.
It is not bad for families just "by extension". It is directly harming the family members even after the divorce.
Yes. Ban the phone apps and had the ads. Advertising works people, that’s why they pay for it!
It's not impossible to beat them consistently, but if you do, they'll limit how much you can bet or just ban you.
> $x is pumped into the system by the punters, $y is extracted, $z is returned. The 'house' is the only winner.
This is incorrect, specifically with regard to sports betting. Sports betting and poker are both winnable games. Most people don't win in the long run, but unlike in table games (Blackjack, etc.) there are absolutely winners that are not the house.
To be clear, that doesn't mean they're good or should be allowed. I used to be a poker player and enjoy putting some bets on football now, but I've come around to the general idea that sports betting in particular is a net negative for society. Still, if you're going to make an argument against it, it's always going to be a better argument if it isn't built on a basis that's just factually untrue.
Not limited to the US:
prostitution was legal and then it was not and now there is a laissez-faire of some kind in some places, in others there are brothels, in others you cannot, strictly speaking, but in practice it is whatever;
The consumption of alcohol was initially allowed, then forbidden, and later allowed again. Nowadays, some "thought leaders" are again somewhat pushing, if not for regulation, for public condemnation;
Abortion, same-sex sexual relationships, gambling, drugs, they all follow a similar pattern of regulation-liberalization-regulation- (random order), answering to "society" or some prominent voices within or the ever fleeting vibes of the times.
In other words, it does not make, strictly speaking, sense that certain behaviors are regulated or prohibited, and others are not.
In my state, it was the state run lotto that was used to sell the idea "Hey we'll take lottery proceeds and fund education with it!!!!!". Of course, state-run lottery was legalized, and yes, the proceeds did run schools.
The next funding session, they CUT the existing funding to schools and had the lottery run the bulk of the funding. They naturally never said that part out loud.
And riverboat gambling was a quazi-legal thing. Then casinos were legalized. Then normalized gambling everywhere. Even the local groceries have state-run lotto vending machines that gobble 20's and 50's for a chance to strike it rich, or more likely, get poorer.
I prefer when gambling was decriminalized individually, but not endorsed for the state or companies to run. I also don't want cop squads cracking down on the penny or quarter games in peoples' houses.
I think it was Illinois' state lotto that encouraged Indiana to also unrestrict it initially for government based gambling ($1 scratchoffs and weekly lotto drawing). Pretty sure they also did the "school budget scam" by transferring tax proceeds from the lotto instead of adding it as well.
Again, though, news in the 1980's didnt have as much traveling power, unless it showed up in the NY Times or other national level papers. And the local papers actuually did local news then.
Legalization of sports betting, online poker, and meme cryptocurrencies are all highly visible examples of normalized gambling. Young people increasingly seem to believe that they need to gamble to get anywhere in life.
edit for examples:
* https://www.newsweek.com/sports/mlb/red-sox-pitcher-confront...
* https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/giants/article/mlb-threat...
These young women don't have the money to hire security and are especially vulnerable as a result
The next step would probably be eliminating betting on individual players, you can still bet on weird stuff but it would have to be $team does $thing. It wouldn't work for solo sports but given the most popular sports are all team sports it would cover a lot.
They are great things coming from it, like school funding, but the whole concept doesn't really sit well with me.
https://casinocontrol.ohio.gov/home/news-and-events/all-news...
This is how the US ended up with rampant sports gambling/advertising, something the UK has had most of this century. It's also how we ended up with voter ID in the UK despite having near-zero problems with voter impersonation.
This less wrong piece by a libertarian who examines the numbers and struggles to reconcile them with his beliefs is one of the best indictments on sports betting.
There is a small proportion of the population who cannot handle this. And they become prey to the predators in the sports betting industry. These guys make money off destroying their lives.
I strongly disagree with the authors political stance, which makes the fact that we agree on the problem / solution a nice bipartisan result
Sure gambling will always happen wherever there's something with uncertainty. But to make it fully legal opens the doors wide open for growth, leading to the only possible outcome of "more money being bet". I think it would be naive to assume that the integrity of any sport stays stable when such a large amount of money is staked on it.
After all, sports betting was legal in several states such as NJ, Nevada, as long as they were taking place in the casinos in Atlantic City/Las Vegas, and we didn't see any major negative impacts like we do now.
Gambling and betting should be 1v1 , as soon as you introduce a pool or an aggregator the wise advice is to stay away if such pool or aggregator has more than say a certain amount of bettors (100k-1M), because you become the new kid on the block and the new kid on the block gets skinned.
Thing is the implication of all the above is that we should stay away from every stock market and that would be quite right considering how it produces such loopsided outcomes, not unlike the gambling platforms or even worse
SGPs have margins that would make options traders blush and were sold to people with no financial sophistication whatsoever. These things turn your phone into a vampire, and have no socially redeeming value. Please ban them!
Im fine with sports betting, what Im not fine with is my hockey games being saturated with ads, odds, and commentary about something that they keep telling us is tangential and not supposed-to-be-taken-seriously!
The whole thing is pathetic and I don't see how it's sustainable. There's going to be a Mothers Against Gambling movement or something after enough lives get wrecked.
And I'd like to add that most of the people throw the term around "lives get wrecked / ruined" flippantly around this, but that's exactly what it is. Your life is wrecked, you can't fix it, nothing can fix it. If only you never started gambling...
Financial interests.
It seems more direct to me: either you lose to the house, or you lose to someone else while the house gets a cut. Is that second part what you see as MLMish?
However gambling time is seen as virtous and to be celebrated, whereas gambling money is the devil.
At least if you lose money you can make it back, when you gamble time good luck getting back your 4 year studying for a gender studies degree.
Also here on HN gambling on a startup which most likely go to 0 is seen as amazing, whereas betting on the Jacksonville Jaguars to win the SuperBowl is seen as bad and to be condamned , even though the Jaguars bet is at least an order of magnitude more likely to generate profits than the startup one.
If I gamble on a sporting event, the outcome of the sporting event does not change. Someone wins. Someone loses. No value created. The outcome is societally zero sum in expectation.
If your net worth is less than 100M you have no business concerning yourself with societal value creation in the U.S.
The only reason to create a startup instead of betting on a sporting event is that in the startup although your odds are longer you get to learn a field that presumibly you like and forage in an environment of similarly thinking individuals
Nowadays where the startup world is all about networking and performance art and chasing the wave and all sorts of KPI BS, and sell out to VC firms...give me the sport bet every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Either that or 100M and then I can start worrying about societal outcomes,
Also don't forget that one of the many ways in which for that sport bet windfall could be spent might be donating it to charity
The sport bet is the MVB (minimum viable bet) whereas the startup is this complicated megabet with hundreds moving parts in which you also have to act to either impress your boss or investors (or both)
I'd rather we tackle the root problems leading to these. Increase education rather than reduce liberties.
I'm not, like, strongly opposed to reducing this particular liberty, but man it's not my first priority.
Education wont beat that. Gambling is not a rational decision in the first place.
But, young men gambling (they are the primary target demographic) will make them into desperate and hopeless group. And not just financially, marrying or dating gambler is even bigger mistake then partnering with an alcoholic. Their lives will go down the drain in all aspects.
I find this one of the most difficult to answer questions about how you should run a society. In practice, we aim to curb the excesses and treat them as if they are illnesses but even that does not stop the damage. In the end it is an education problem. People are not taught to deal with a massive menu of options for addiction and oblivion, while at the same time their lives are structurally manipulated to select them for that addiction.
In the UK for instance, where sports betting is legal (and in some other EU countries as well) it is a real problem. But the parties that make money of it (and who prey mostly on the poor) are so wealthy and politically connected that even if the bulk of the people would be against it I doubt something could be done about it. If it were made illegal it would still continue, but underground. It's really just another tax on the poor.
Sports betting is problematic for the sports too. It causes people to throw matches for money and it exposes athletes to danger and claims of purposefully throwing matches when that might not be the case. This isn't a new thing ( https://apnews.com/article/sports-betting-scandals-1a59b8bee... ), it is essentially as old as the sports themselves.
I think there are really three questions bundled in there:
1. At what point is it not really free-will anymore, and more like your brain being hacked?
2. At what point can the government step in to rescue you from #1?
3. At what point can the government step in to defend others from what you do, voluntarily or otherwise?
Gambling used to be much more restricted in the UK, although horse race betting was always a thing.
Banning gambling doesn’t mean hunting down gamblers, it means stopping them from being in the App Store listings and showings ads in TV.
If you want to find sketchy websites on your own after that - that’s your freedom.
Having 20 year old men bombarded with gambling media is not freedom.
Smoking is a great example and an almost 1:1 parallel to what's happening with gambling, they had teams of people and even paid off scientists to fabricate studies about the health benefits of smoking, and then used deceptive marketing that was very carefully crafted to ensure people tried it out, and the product itself is just inherently addictive. They ensured they can capture the next generation by specifically tailoring their adverts towards children and getting them curious to try tobacco.
As a result most of the world has banned tobacco advertising, and a lot of places are doing things like enforcing ugly generic packaging with extreme health issues plastered on the boxes, exorbitant prices & taxes on tobacco because of what Big Tobacco did.
Gambling should be treated the exact same as tobacco is and was. Advertising it should never be allowed in any context whatsoever, and the gambling spots and apps should have disclaimers all over the place indicating the dangers of it. Additionally, the actual companies should be heavily regulated to not be allowed to offer "perks" and to also not be allowed to pick who can play or not.
Gambling, like most things, is simply something that will always be a thing, so just like tobacco and alcohol it shouldn't be banned outright. That doesn't mean we need to let predatory practices proliferate. Nothing is stopping us from making gambling as unattractive as we reasonably can, both for the gamblers and the gambling companies. There will still be gambling, but just like tobacco there will be a lot less people doing it, and at that point the ones that are are at least as protected and informed as possible.
I'm writing this because I want you to know what you're depriving me of. Because _other_ people make poor decisions, we need to take that decision away from everyone.
Now I don't give a fuck that banning it would deprive me (or you) of something we happen to enjoy.
Here‘s the article that started me toward changing my mind: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-exp...
Why can't you legally drive over 100 mph when you know you'd do it safely?
Why can't you own certain kinds of weapons when you know you don't want to kill anyone or yourself?
Gamblers going bankrupt is bad for all of us because they often have families and creditors who are harmed by the loss of the money, and the rest of us pay the price in the form of welfare, loss wages, etc.
For one, we are just discussing financial ruin. Not deaths by guns or cars. And it does not impact you. Or else you would need to just regulate poor spending habits. At worse.
I think in principle just about everyone agrees in freedom and liberty where it does not affect society. We usually disagree just about what constitutes 'affecting others'.
> Because _other_ people make poor decisions, we need to take that decision away from everyone.
Sports betting is to entertainment what ultra-processed food is to nutrition, engineered to be addictive, marketed as "pleasure" and technically a personal choice, but built on exploiting human psychology
You can enjoy a burger or a bet responsibly, sure, but the problem is the systemic design, it's optimized for overconsumption and dependency, not well being, you end up creating problems whole society have to pay for it, it's systemic harm
Im all for people like you having the right to make a choice, but the way its advertised rubs me the wrong way.
Kids are encouraged to watch the games which is a bit of a family event. Then during those games, ads are just everywhere for betting. Then theres a "18+ only" fine print.
We banned cigarette advertisements during sports and I would say we are better for it, but I wouldn't call to ban smoking.
Stocks are not that, in general. A particular fraudulent investment could be that. Crypto investment comes to mind.
Because your money will at least get you a roof over your head. It's not a bet because it involves an element of chance. I can't believe you're seriously raising such an argument.
We could honestly say gambling and investments were similar - if they typically had similar outcomes.
In late 1990s, I set up two customers (in retirement) with PCs and internet. One was a day trader and the other did online casinos. After a year they were both about as good as their contemporaries.
The day trader made more money than he lost but I don't know how much.
The gambler hid his habit from his wife. He lost their entire retirement savings, maxed out their credit cards, got more cards and maxed those out - and took out 2 mortgages on their formerly paid-for house. It ended their marriage.
These truly aren't similar outcomes.
I think the difference is that buying/betting on a house or stocks are not a zero-sum game. It is feasible for everyone to buy a house, all the houses to increase in real-world value, and everyone benefit. Likewise with stocks. And on top of that effect, the bets being made are useful for society at large to make better plans, because they are a measure of society’s best predictions. Sports betting on the other hand, is truly zero-sum (although I think you could make an argument that it's actually worse than zero sum). Additionally, it is not useful for society to predict which team will win some set of games. This is just wasted effort on a curiosity. There’s nothing wrong with that effort as entertainment, but it is bad to incentivize our minds to take up sports betting, as opposed to say finance, engineering, art, or anything productive.