Addiction Markets
thebignewsletter.com
thebignewsletter.com
But if you want to outlaw this harmful activity [licensed gambling], you have to find a way to replace 6.4% of Maryland’s budget, which is slightly less than the entire amount the state brings in from corporate taxes.
Do I misunderstand, or is this just actually incredible?
Edit: and I know it sounds weird to say that gambling taxes are too high, when one could argue that high taxes are meant to disincentivize a thing - but if that thing is highly addictive, and if no other state action is taken to disincentivize that thing, then it’s actually a really sticky income source for the government who now doesn’t want to get rid of their cash cow. Tobacco ads are outlawed, which did more than taxing tobacco. Gambling ads are absurdly common.
Edit: at least with state lotteries the state gets most of the money so it is more like a tax; in the case of corporate sports betting the corporation takes the money and then pays a small corporate tax on it.
If you win $95 on one bet and lose $100 on another, you owe taxes on $5 of that $95.
If I understand correctly that’s no longer the case as “sports betting” prediction markets are now becoming a financial product.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-07-10/do-...
The main sportsbooks you see advertising on TV like Draft Kings, Fan Duel, etc are still the old sports betting model where you're betting against the house. That's still taxed as sports betting. Kalshi, Polymarket, and some smaller sports focused apps like NoVig and Sporttrade are prediction markets that allow sports predictions and those would allow a full write off.
That said, I've heard that most of the major sportsbooks like Draft Kings and Fan Duel are building out their own prediction market platforms, so I think it's only a matter of time until everyone is in that model. Even ignoring the tax implications, it's lower risk and more consistent revenue for the books since they can structure things so they make money on every trade (if they want).
Do they, though? The vig is 10%, very transparently shown in the odds, and paid immediately. It proves very little disincentive. The tax is paid annually and only if you win; for most people, it is 0%. Are we really going to argue that the tax is a serious factor in discouraging the behavior?
That's not the gambling-activity-specific taxes that Stoller's article discusses - typically applied to gambling businesses' revenues, not bet winners specifically.
That's because "tax the rich" is actually pretty bad tax policy because the rich really don't make a lot more income than the upper-middle to lower classes.
If you look at countries with robust social safety nets, they don't get there by taxing the rich.
The problem is that the rich are ultra mobile, just like their capital, so unless you restrict that they’ll just move somewhere else where taxes are low.
So countries basically end up competing with each other by lowering taxes to attract them while destroying their middle classes..
Same more or less applies to companies
So upper middle class ends up paying the bill.
Sufficiently high LVT will deter speculation, leading to collapse in land price and encouraging efficient usage of land and drastically affecting our political landscape.
But since they are such a large cohort, you cannot form a policy around increasing the burden on them. And after all, the tech family pulling $450k/yr are still a "working grunts".
So it's all eye's on the top 1%, but a true wealth gap fix would actually come mostly from harvesting the wealth of the top 20-30%.
England managed to confiscate the estates of its major lords through the inheritance tax.
The rich can leave, but they can't take their house with them.
For modern gambling (not including some prediction market setups) its actually all of the people (still allowed to play), most of the time.
Because if you win regularly they limit or outright ban you from playing. If they keep letting you play they have determined algorithmically that you're statistically a loser over time.
So not only is this easy access to online/app-based gambling financially devastating for those predisposed to become addicted to it, its also effectively legally rigged in that the house has no obligation to take bets from people who are actually good at it, and they have all the data they need to detect that very quickly.
There are services called betting exchanges that essentially facilitate peer-to-peer gambling, they make money from commission so they don't care at all about your betting strategy, big players and companies are probably operating on those platforms.
Otherwise they wouldnt be able to give out "free bets money" for marketing purposes all the time as you could just play opposite bets on multiple platforms.
And you're not weak willed are you? So nothing to worry about. Bad things only happen to bad people.
Though as I understand it much of money in gambling is made from "whales" - players who lose lots of money and keep playing anyway. The same term is used for f2p game players who spend a lot of money on in-app purchases, often tokens for virtual slot machines for desirable in-game items.
Property tax's a mixed bag since it taxes both land and building when ideally you only want to tax land.
States that impose income taxes are choosing not to imposes taxes elsewhere like land, which is the ideal tax. Income taxes have negative consequences since you're taxing economic activity.
The amount of land is fixed. Taxation on land does not decrease land, but rather incentivizes efficient land use and decreasing land values (which improves efficiency of land use).
The result is a downtown with empty lots, abandoned buildings, and short buildings, right next to skyscrapers making much better use of their footprint and surrounding infrastructure
When a pedestrian has to walk one block further because they're walking past an empty building or empty lot that a rich person has dibs on, it produces negative value for the city
[Edit: fun fact: threatening to withhold this funding is how the U.S. DOT managed to essentially federalize drinking age of 21. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Dole)]
If there’s a massive burden with addicts, you can still impose that the gambling industry pays more to offset.
This logic always bugs me because no one truly lives in a vacuum. People are flawed and generally need help from a community. A small community can't really fight back a well endowed company like gambling companies. The whole(stated) reason android is losing unsigned side loading is because grandmas in SEA are sideloading gambling apps.
It's obvious to me that gambling is generally a vulnerability in the human psyche. For many, it short circuits something in their brain and forms genuine addiction.
It's actually insane to me to use this vulnerability as a tax base to fund roads and schools, because regardless of the funds, your incentives will still be perverse and those incentives will dictate that more people need to be losing their money to out-of-state firms because a small portion of it might fund roads and schools.
The incentives basically state: "A percentage of our population must become sick and addicted to risk and reward in order for society to function". Is this not basically the concept of Omelas?
Do you have more details on this? I hadn't heard this angle on the story before.
I'm mildly surprised this is a concern Google has to have.
This adds to the burden of finding what to ban, which may be different depending on who you ask.
Go tell that to joint bank accounts and family court.
In all seriousness, all the pushback against paternalism comes from people who still believe in free will.
Except when the behavior is too common, in which case it will become a relevant revenue source for the government, incentivizing them to encourage the vice. Case in point, here's the Japanese tax agency asking for ideas how to incentivize young people to drink more alcohol. https://soranews24.com/2022/08/17/japanese-government-worrie...
If both outcomes have a probability of 0.999 (summing to almost 2), I'll barely make any money if I'm right, and lose my money if I'm wrong.
So when probabilities sum to less than 1, it's good for the gambler, and when they sum to more than 1 it's bad for them (and good for the bookkeeper).
Related concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3735171/
Why should gambling be different?
Not sure what this means. Why can't gambling taxes just be applied at point of sale to create friction?
Sports gambling ads have ruined sports media. State lottery ads are even worse. The government should not spend money to encourage its own citizens to partake in harmful activities.
No.
If you want restrictions on gambling, on advertising it, on participating in it, on making money from it, you want to restrict individual liberty.
I want to restrict individual liberty, I have voted against gambling when it has come up for a vote in my state over and over.
You want to appear to be the type of person who wants to maintain individual liberty, but you in fact are not. You want to restrict individual liberty in the area of gambling.
I would also like to appear to be the type of person who wants to maintain individual liberty, and I will vote against gambling every single time it comes up.
No gambling.
Equating them as exactly the same doesn't serve your argument justice even if you do have a point with respect to the OP's "have their cake and eat it too" rhetorical flourish.
I want to restrict individual liberty.
Do you want to restrict advertising on gambling?
Banning gambling ads isn’t banning gambling. It’s just stopping corporations from pushing addictive behavior on people who didn’t consent to see it.
We banned cigarette ads for the same reason — harm and addiction.
Limiting corporate ad power protects individual liberty. I can choose to gamble if I want, but I shouldn’t have to fight off brainwashing every time I watch a game.
I don't think we can build anything good in the long run if we imagine there's a clear and obvious line between them.
To ban advertising of gambling is to limit a liberty too, but the kind that substantially affects others. See also: dumping a bucketful of water on a passer-by, smoking in a crowded subway car, blaring super loud music outside at night time.
That second kind of liberty is and will always be limited in a society, voluntarily most of the time, because people want to be good neighbors, not harm each other.
Another problem here is the addiction. Advertising applesauce is one thing, advertising cocaine is another. For some people, gambling is more like cocaine, hampering their reason and forcing their hand in making choices. The freedom to advertise cocaine (and tobacco, alcohol, etc) inevitably gets limited in a society; if it does not, the society likely unravels.
Extreme example: I don't have individual liberty to murder or take things that aren't mine. So I'm ok with giving up at least 1 or 2 individual liberties. How many is enough, and who decides?
Or do we all just decide and that is the point of voting, not sure what you're trying to say.
No.
An organization's liberty to advertise is not individual liberty.
Let individuals gamble. Do not let organizations advertise gambling services. Organizational liberty is not individual liberty.
You're restricting my liberty to consume those advertisements. I want to see them and you are restricting them.
I grant that, but I never claimed the contrary. I never suggested that banning advertising reduces ALL harm or preserves ALL individual liberty. I just believe an ad ban is a good compromise position.
I'm a former smoker. I would have been outraged had the government tried to ban cigarettes while I was addicted to nicotine. But there's a difference between allowing people to have their vices and allowing people to spend hundreds of millions in multi-media advertising campaigns convincing others to pick up a new one.
1. Ban advertizing of it. (because it provides no benefit for the nation as a whole)
2. But allow people to do it. (because they will then do it illegally, which is bad for the nation as a whole)
I think it's that simple.
There won't be a large grey market for advertisements.
Try regulating that on the internet, or walk down a construction sight in Manhattan, there are illegal ads all over.
The market for what you mention is less than 1% the legal market.
If someone shows the regulator an ad for fanduel that shouldn't exist, they pull their permit to operate.
We have already seen that you can ban ads pretty effectively. I can't remember the last time I saw a cigarette ad, hell, where I live you can't even display them openly in stores, I can't even recall the last time I saw a cigarette logo.
I have yet to see any 'grey market' cigarette ads.
No ads on TV/Radio. Mandated warnings. In some countries, packaging must carry prominent health warnings, in some cases excluding virtually all branding (Australia, for example).
That along with high taxation, smoking cessation programs, legal proceedings against tobacco companies, restrictions on retailling, etc., have drastically reduced smoking rates in many countries.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_smoking#Public_policy>
That move alone would make a big dent in many of the major problems of modern living.
Food, tobacco, alcohol get more interesting... As there is bit harder time to assign blame of each meal. Maybe in those cases the claimants should be able to fully list everything they have ingested over say past 10 years. So that liability can be fairly and exactly distributed.
Betting companies employ all the tricks to make you a gambler. The more you loose, the more they target you. And if the gambler atops playing they literally go put of their way to nake them relapse.
Do they addicts have to self report to get treatment? Do we force them?
It takes a little bit of money but you can get a beer at the supermarket.
Most countries will let 18 year olds drink beer in a park.
Still in effect is a ban on sales for off-premise consumption after 11:00pm and before 08:00am. Also, the number of stores that can sell alcohol for off-premise consumption is restricted by a quota system.
Experts sometimes spell it "off-premise":
https://www.nabca.org/covid-19-dashboards-premise-retailers has "While there are several different retail channels permitted to sell alcoholic beverages for offsite (off-premise) consumption".
https://www.parkstreet.com/states/california/ has "Retailers [c]an sell product directly to consumers for on or off-premise consumption".
"Off-premises" is also used.
My own folk etymology of this infelicity is that it started with the mispronunciation, which is actually hard to avoid in rapid speech, and bled over to people simply writing the wrong word.
Edit: [in reply to your edit]
It is indeed a rather common malapropism.
It can be a real pain to get alcohol without planning in these places.
I don't have a problem with people smoking or drinking, but I agree we shouldn't allow advertising. However, they should be able to advertise in adult only outlets.
ex: Does Playboy still have Cigarette and Liqour advertisements?
> I'm fairly pro-market, but I agree with this. I think people should do what they want if they don't harm themselves or others.
"You're pro-market? Why do you support letting children buy cocaine!?!"
This has minimum impact on personal liberty, and will almost eliminate problem gambling.
It's one thing to put a slightly higher number and the number box each time, it's another to do identity theft or coaxing your spouse into letting you play as them.
If there are no ads to tell you, you have to, first, be informed that sports gambling is a thing people do, then decide that it's a thing you want participate in, and then obtain information on how it's done. This adds friction. Friction reduces participation. But if you really want to gamble? You still can.
Is it advertising when the announcer for a game talks about gambling? There's statements that obviously would be advertising, so the interesting thing is where and how to draw the line.
If an announcer just wants to talk about gambling, fine, I guess, but I really doubt that there are any announcers that would do much of that.
That should push the shadier operators out of the limelight, though it would likely leave large-pot gaming (sports, Powerball, etc.) standing, at least for a while.
(I'd very much like to hear criticisms of this approach.)
Side remark: I love to ridicule that of all things producers of very unhealthy food and beverages (or to put it more directly: producers of foods and drinks that make you fat and thus unathletic) love to sponsor sports events. :-)
> The government should not spend money to encourage its own citizens to partake in harmful activities.
That's what goverment ever do.
All of them also introduce rarities (arbitrary exclusiveness), hidden cards in a pack, and extreme gambling gamification.
The only non-gambling MtG packs are the preconstructed commander decks. All 100 cards are published. But the packs and boxes? Pure gambling, especially for the chase rare cards.
And before anyone asks, yes, my username is based after this $2 card. https://edhrec.com/commanders/nekusar-the-mindrazer
Which is a shame, since the game itself is actually fun. Or it would be if you could buy the cards easily and cheaply.
tldr: fights, and watch someone buy the entire shelf at walmart in one transaction.
Also consider that most Magic cards are also valuable only because of their collector status. The valuable ones are mint first editions and nobody is buying them to play them.
So who fuels this collectors market? Nostalgic 30-something that have now disposable income and want to buy things they wanted as children. Same as with videogames collectors and such. You don't need an original copy of Supermario to play it, but people still spend thousands to buy it.
Anyway, this is why I play MTG online - same with 40k, although there's no gambling there. Just too expensive to play either IRL even if I wanted to.
There is, until there isn't. MTG has been leaning drastically into tiered and ultra-premium products. Increasingly, it feels like Magic design and product is focused on extracting money from the whales at the price of hollowing out their playerbase.
It's difficult to draw a hard line between wholesome collecting and lootbox gambling, but it's hard not to notice that even the bastions of the collectible industry have been aggressively moving in the direction of the latter.
I would guess that collecting goes beyond wholesome once finding the products comes really hard and there is very high prices and extremely low rates involved.
I think this depends on how you interact with your chosen game. To me, I play Yugioh as a hobby. If I'm "only" into the digital versions of the game, then it's no different to playing just about any other video game.
And even then, these live service TCGs (outside of unofficial simulators) can often have the same lootbox/pack gambling aspects as the real thing.
Personally that's not what I want. A good chunk of why I play paper is because of the physical community, in a space outside my home.
The thing is now people are marketing the pack opening. You have social media accounts of them pulling cards from packs and getting all hyped up about it. Again no one thought that was fun in the 90s, everyone hated that aspect of cards in the 90s but thats because the unboxing as an experience wasn't marketed by anyone at all. People just wanted cards they thought were personally cool in some way.
And likewise expansion of markets in the internet era means people start to have shared values of what is a valuable card based on market price vs just being interested in some certain cards out of your own interest.
How old was everyone in the 1990s? Kids loved this kind of thing in the 2000s.
That's still the move. Unless you want to gamble.
Now as an adult, I see tweens with addictions to multiple things. Watch them beg to buy a Pokemon pack, open it, and lose interest. It's completely the dopamine expectation. And it takes years in recovery. But I think I was ignorant and unaware in the 90s of what other people were addicted to.
Like most new games these days. I play only old games or few special ones like Baldur’s Gate anymore.
Edit: btw if anyone is looking for a civ4 game hit me up
I never understand why people "collect" these things
Their value is much less speculative and much more closely based on (blindbox price * distribution percentage of the rare variants) than most of the other items being dicussed here.
However, you can buy sealed product to both build your collection and get cards to trade. And the main reason for sealed to exist, ostensibly, is limited.
And a lot of people don't interact with the "gambling" aspect at all. I'm very deep into magic after 10 years, and I almost exclusively buy singles and do prereleases. I might buy like 10 random packs total in an entire year.
Coffeezilla: Exposing the Gambling Epidemic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45773049 - October 2025
There is no convergence. They have always been the same thing. The difference is that you can provide a venue where harm is reduced or one where harm is maximised.
In the simplest case you might hold a stock and a put to limit your downside for a set period of time.
By contrast, sports gambling is well, gambling. And importantly as we've seen in a lot of reports - the big online sports books essentially freeze out anyone who is good so that they are collecting revenue primarily from the.. innumerate.
Of course you also have some markets like India without legal gambling and oversized derivatives markets that are unfortunately serving as a replacement.
I'd also point out that you don't see the sort of degenerate nonstop advertising for options punting that you see for sports gambling. "Thanks for tuning into the ESPN FanDuel pregame show at the Caesars Superdome / and don't forget to stop by the DraftKings Sportsbook lounge." Followed by a barrage of other gambling ads in between plays.
For commodities, the Futures demand delivery of the underlying. Options are settles in cash.
https://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1990/9015/901507.PDF, specifically page 94.
Also, IMO there is a big difference between an open market that allows for price discovery and free trading versus placing bets against the same casino at predetermined prices.
See prostitution.
Off the top of my head:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-31/great-bri...
https://kyla.substack.com/p/gamblemerica-how-sports-betting-...
https://www.ft.com/content/e80df917-2af7-4a37-b9af-55d23f941...
https://www.dopaminemarkets.com/p/the-lottery-fication-of-ev...
https://www.investors.com/news/investing-gambling-robinhood-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-premier-league-footb...
https://www.ft.com/content/a39d0a2e-950c-4a54-b339-4784f7892...
Because this practice was made legal very recently in most places in the US and a concomitant advertising boom has saturated the media. Before the last few years, your average American couldn't bet on sports without visiting a casino sports book in person, or having a bookie (i.e., entering into a risky relationship with organized crime). TV sports coverage now openly refers to how you can use their analysis to make bets.
"The Five Families - the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese - have ruled the city's Italian American mafia since 1931."
"The Five Families are part of the larger American-Sicilian mafia operation known as La Cosa Nostra"
It's being said because the Five Families was erroneously conflated with Cosa Nostra in the original press conference by one of the representatives of law enforcement.
Gambling is the chance to have nothing at the end.
If person A waited a few days and the stock shot up, then it's basically gambling since no stock has 50% expected returns in a few days. These are the "random" fluctuations in the market. Another person made a similar bet and their stock went to $5 instead, losing money. Overall it's negative sum.
If person A waited a few years instead and their stock went up to $15, sure then it's different. But it's stock investing, not trading. They made a profit because they held stocks, not traded them. You also get dividends for holding stocks, not trading them.
You are only ever expected to make money from trading stocks since you kind of also have to hold the stocks for a bit. Stock traders accidentally invest and that's how they make any money at all compared to pure gamblers.
Note that I am talking about the vast majority of stock traders here but not the financial experts or algo trading firms that try to find inefficiencies and exploit them. They can actually help with price discovery and profit by making the markets more efficient. But even they're only making calculated bets at best much like good poker players. Most regular people have no chance.
Also the stock market is NOT 0-sum. A buyer and seller can both "win".
If you look the whole lifetime of the stock and all owners and their transactions, it is close to zero-sum. Company can get more wealth by selling which is the exception and your argument. But for average retail-trader it is zero-sum game.
> if you need help making responsible choices, call…
Like, the only “responsible” choice is not to gamble online. What do they even think we’re supposed to take away from that line of the commercial?
I don't gamble at all in any form, but I still firmly disagree. Some people enjoy gambling in a way that never hurts them-- I've known countless friends and coworkers who talk about doing a bit of it in Vegas or what have you. You're saying every last one is a degenerate gambler somehow concealing it totally from me? They know they're not going net positive on the experience, usually lose some money, and get some entertainment.
There's a saying about this: abusers give vice a bad name. People should be free to gamble if they want to, and certain checks should be put in place for people who choose to gamble so much it is ruinous to themselves.
It feels like a bell curve topic, where the most naive people think you should just ban all vices and have a strictly better world, the middle of the road thinks it's all down to personal fortitude, and then people who know how the sausage is made realize the level of asymmetry that exists.
Weed isn't just weed anymore, it's fruity pebbles flavored.
Porn isn't just porn anymore, it tries to talk like a person and build a parasocial relationship.
Video games aren't just video games anymore, they start embedding gambling mechanics and spending 2 years designing the "End of Match" screen in a way that funnels you into the next game or lootbox pull.
You need to stop somewhere. Tech + profit motives create an asymmetric war for people's attention and money that results in new forms of old vices that are superficially the same, but realistically much much worse.
Gambling specifically online might just be giving tech companies too many knobs that are too easy to tune under the umbrella of engagement and retention.
I agree, but:
> It feels like a bell curve topic, where the most naive people think you should just ban all vices and have a strictly better world, the middle of the road thinks it's all down to personal fortitude, and then people who know how the sausage is made realize the level of asymmetry that exists.
There's a wide gap in beliefs of the people who "know how the sausage is made" which is why I'm guessing you didn't ascribe a certain view to them.
Realistically, I think it breaks down into three camps:
1. They agree with the other end of the curve, and think the potential harm is too great.
2. They're in on profiting from it.
3. They are open to people being free to make decisions, but think there needs to be regulations on outright predatory behavior and active enforcement of them
I don't have a problem with anybody choosing to safely engage with recreational drugs, pornography, gambling, alcohol, and a number of other vices - humans have sought these activities out for an extremely long time, and outright banning them simply (as we have seen time and time again) leads to unregulated black markets that are more harmful to society as a whole. But it feels like we've done a complete 180 and now we have barely any regulation where it's needed, late-stage capitalism at its finest.
So many states have put ID verification laws out for accessing pornography, exposing citizens to huge privacy risks in the process, but we've got casino empires draining their savings accounts and can't do anything about it? Please.
They have different reasons for their disdain, but neither side tends to love it.
In general the more people learn about the process, the more they dislike the current system. There's outliers, but that's why the last decade has mostly been a decline in general sentiment around big tech, and even in the last year AI doomerism is going increasingly mainstream.
Even the people who make these experiences don't do it beliving they're making something enriching. And they're definitely are not clamoring for their own families to grow up on this stuff.
> So many states have put ID verification laws out for accessing pornography, exposing citizens to huge privacy risks in the process, but we've got casino empires draining their savings accounts and can't do anything about it? Please.
That's driven by politicians pandering to the naive side of the bell curve, why are you surprised it's not consistent with what's best for the people?.
Their actions are driven mostly by what looks good at the polls and doesn't hurt their own bottom line too badly.
States are raking in billions of dollars in taxes from gambling, so it's not going to get that treatment.
This is why I have a huge problem with the recent development of online gambling outlets that you can access via your smartphone. In the past you had to go somewhere to gamble, it was a physical act that provided a barrier to entry. Now? You don't even need to think about it, your bank account is already linked, just spend away!
Personally, I'd rather states loosen laws and allow physical casinos be built and properly regulated than be in the current situation we have with these poorly regulated online money-siphons.
That's the house making sure that the house are always the winner.
[1] https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/DMHAS/Publications/2023-CT-FIN... [2] https://www.umass.edu/seigma/media/583/download
I agree there’s a some sort of gray area here, but it feels awfully narrow… especially with the recent sports betting companies.
Sports betting companies structure their odds and order books to disadvantage most bettors. There are plenty of markets where that isn't the case.
But chances are that the original commenter was really using language in a more colloquial way, the way someone might say "the only responsible choice is not to use drugs". Someone saying that isn't making a statement that "no person ever, under any circumstance, can ever benefit from consuming any drug".
It's not an absolutist statement, but you are choosing to interpret it that way so that you can construct a response based on semantic pedantry.
Goalposts built around strawmen are almost designed to be shifted.
The way I resolve this is “What if everyone did what I did?”. The restaurants would obviously have to change. I figure the type of demand I create is more powerful than how they might use the profit.
I think the same thing applies here. If everyone only gambled responsibly, these companies would all be in the responsible gambling business.
At the same time, I think sports gambling has completely gotten out of control and needs to be more regulated. More advertising regulation seems like a good place to start.
The stakes probably aren’t as high in mobile, but it’s otherwise the same dance.
"The proportion of Connecticut gambling revenue from the 1.8% of people with gambling problems ranges from 12.4% for lottery products to 51.0% for sports betting, and is 21.5% for all legalized gambling."
Without going into details, I do have some ability to check if these numbers actually "make sense" against real operator data. Will try to sense-check if the data I have access to, roughly aligns with this or not.
- the "1.8% of people" being problem gamblers does seem roughly correct, per my own experience
- but those same 1.8% being responsible for 51% of sportsbook revenue, does not align with my intuition (which could be wrong! hence why I want to check further...)
- it is absolutely true that sportsbooks have whales/VIPs/whatever-you-call-them, and the general business model is indeed one of those shapes where <10% of the customers account for >50% of the revenue (using very round imprecise numbers), but I still don't think you can attribute 51% to purely the "problem gamblers" (unless you're using a non-standard definition of problem-gambler maybe?)
- Yes, you can find certain slices of 1.8% of customers, that would represent 50%+ of revenue... But this is usually pretty close to simply listing out the top 1.8% of all accounts by spend
- Therefore, to support the original claim, one would essentially have to definitionally accept that nearly all of the top revenue accounts are "problem gamblers" and almost no one else is... But this doesn't pass a basic smell test, because population wise there are more "poor" problem-gamblers than there are "rich" ones, because there are a lot more poor people in general than rich ones, so it's very unlikely that nearly all of the 1.8% of total population problem gamblers also happen to overlap so much with the top 1.8% customer accounts by revenue.
What name do we give “the guy who says it’s fine to tear down Chestertons fence” ?
Not at all. First, yes, people should be free to make their own choices. But that means making free choices. Just as we don’t allow advertising for cigarettes, we shouldn’t allow advertising for gambling.
Second, there’s a world of difference between “hey, let’s go have a crazy weekend in Vegas” and “I have a blackjack dealer live on my phone 24x7.”
It's a net negative for society but we can't simply get rid of it because of the side effect of doing so, particularly since it's so easy to brew alcohol.
A person can be generally responsible while still making decisions that are irresponsible. Gambling has a negative expected value, and so is generally considered to be irresponsible. Gamblers will often counter that they expect to lose their money and consider it to be a form of entertainment, but the whole of the entertainment is in believing that you might get lucky; this is indistinguishable from the motivation of a gambling addict. You don’t see these people taking out $500 in 1s and setting them on fire for fun, even though this is the aggregate outcome of habitual gambling.
Some might protest that all forms of entertainment are like this: You take the $500, take it to a movie theater, and 16 hours later your money is gone and you’ve seen 10 movies. So far as I know, the identification of casual gambling with vice dates back to the Victorian Period. I suspect (but cannot confirm) that the reason gambling was identified as a vice where other forms of comparatively frivolous entertainment were not is due to gambling’s (false) promise of providing money for nothing.
Subscribing to Netflix has a negative expected value.
Ban Netflix.
Restaurants are immoral too since think of the negative health consequences they cause exploiting this situation with their addictive substances. They even put more butter than necessary in the food to make it more addictive.
The wait staff treated literally like servants.
"We should ban everything besides things I personally find enjoyable"
Every streaming service you subscribe to has a negative expected value.
It was you who brought "degenerate" into it, as if throwing an insult or not made difference in facts.
Also, yes, gamblers hide their addiction. That is normal for gambler and you wont know it. They can be likable people and calling them "degenerate" just makes seeking help harder.
(More apt comparison is obviously alcohol commercials saying “please drink responsibly”)
Casinos and gambling institutions absolutely and purposely optimize to attract and capture more problem gamblers.
The evolution of digital slots is a great example of this. An average person could have a little fun with an old fashioned basic slot machine, but the modern ones are so aggressively optimized to trigger addiction and keep addicts going that if you aren't vulnerable, they are massively offputting.
But they don't care, they don't have any desire to serve "Normal" people, and trying to make gambling more fun for people who aren't vulnerable to gambling addiction isn't something they do.
Because nearly all profit comes from addicts.
I've thought of this often, seeing the state of mobile games. Not fun--they barely have strategy, little choice, and so much copy-cat gambling-machine mechanics.
By the 2040 US presidential election, anti-gambling legislation will be a bigger party platform issue than abortion is for one of the two major US political parties.
We are ruining a generation of men with this, just as we did with alcohol in the era before prohibition. A wiser and more sensible approach is desperately needed today, but will not come for another 15 years until the damage is inescapable to see.
It's a bit different today in particular though as we're in equinox season (when many major sports leagues play on the same day). So your local college football team is playing today, the world series game 7 is today, and there are NBA and NHL on today, and NFL is tomorrow.
Also, the people loosing money on crypto, MtG and games with gambling mechanics tend to be more of men. It is kind of a gendered issue.
But gambling is not high risk strategy to become rich. It is basically certainity to loose money strategy.
Yes, making gambling part of masculine identity is what many of those ads are trying to achieve.
But these commercials and ads filled with gold, pictures of cash, crowns, and explosions beg to differ! And think how sweet it would be to win, big, on a bet only you know about.
Polymarket uses open orderbooks where you match against someone else who wants the other side of the trade just like the stock market. Prices are set by the market, as they should be.
Nobody should be day trading unless it's their job. Yes, I have seen many guys get sucked into it.
While we're at it, I propose a Board of Ethically Allowed Activities that make sure we can only do the good and moral things.
The difference is that hobbies are fun. Gambling is fun in the same way smoking is fun. It's not, but you have to do it. I know, because I was a smoker.
Also, on the topic of morality: morality is stupid. Gambling isn't immoral. Or maybe it is, I don't care. Gambling is self destructive. It can pretty much exclusively only make your life worse.
least contrarian HN user
> only make your life worse
Unless you have a family with whom your finances are intermingled. This is like saying alcoholism only makes your own life worse, because obviously your actions have no effect on the people around you, right?
Also you are ignoring platforms like Novig which are like the polymarket for sports betting.
But this is more like playing poker, where overall the casino could care less if you're continuously crushing the other players, as long as people keep turning up to play and they keep getting a rake.
My experience (though I have never bet on these platforms) is that Pinnacle-like platforms almost never let you withdraw your "earnings". They are essentially a bookie.
Polymarket on the other hand, is just an exchange. And they use Defi to make sure you can always withdraw your bounty even if you get "front-end" banned from their platform.
So to affirm the previous poster: These companies are not in the same business.
Susquehanna. Jane Street. Two Sigma.
It's not some rando two towns over. The PMs get paid to front run access to these market makers, who crush the retail bettor, er, predictor.
My understanding was that these shops were acting more as market makers, with the idea of guaranteeing liquidity and tight spreads in some number of markets.
If you think the listed bid-ask spread is mispriced you're more than welcome to move the market to whatever price you think is more appropriate.
Am I going crazy, or was it just... disappeared from there??
I'd hate to get all true scotsman but a true leftist would never preach for prohibition as a solution for vice.
But the audience for these anti-vice takes seems to be "lefty" people. Both center-left folks and also leftists. I see plenty of folks on Bluesky who want a socialist revolution tomorrow that also want to ban gambling.
The case of US Democrats is an example of how useless the 1-dimensional classification is. They can be very socially progressive which would seem to put them well into the "left-wing" territory, but economically they're in the right-wing territory.
Economically speaking, a candidate like Sanders (considered to be too radical even by the Democrats and painted as an extremist by the Republicans) would be considered centrist/centre-left in most of Europe. He supports single payer healthcare and policies that would strengthen worker protections and improve the social safety net, but he doesn't fundamentally oppose capitalism. That's the status quo in most of Europe.
There are some EU laws that are more conservative and some that are less, proponents of policies often cherry-pick the ones that match their ideology leaving out others. Even worse is they ignore the problems that the policies they agree with are causing those countries, but ends-justify-means.
That's what happens when you squash a multi-dimensional space of political beliefs down into a single dimension of left-right. You can't have a meaningful discussion about anything from this starting point.
Viewed from a 2-dimensional spectrum this problem lies on the social authoritarian-libertarian axis, not the economic left-right axis.
I'd consider myself a "true leftist" and while I don't think prohibition usually works, I also don't believe in absolutes of liberalism where everything goes - where corner shops can sell heroin and if you fall into addiction that's just your own moral failing.
I support individuals' freedom to use drugs in a controlled, responsible manner, but there need to be limits somewhere to protect naive individuals from getting themselves into something they'll regret and to protect society from collapsing.
What it has a lot less of is random public policy influencers writing polemics about it. There's some, sure, and that's exactly where RFK and the MAHA coalition come from. But professionals don't treat MAHA and their blogs as coda. So why do we do the same for anything related to money?
(giving extreme benefit of the doubt, here)
2. Fear is the emotion that's easiest to trigger because before modernity, life was indeed quite dangerous. You can make shitload of money by making people feel scared.
3. It is true that for many people, the society got worse, and they want to know why.
With Sport Betting, throwing advertisements and having bets talked about by sports analysts during the game is starting to be seen as bad thing because it's seen as really bad habit, like smoking and maybe society should attempt to regulate it better.
These are mostly men, and a very specific type of men. You can try to curtail their access to gambling but we're missing the underlying problem.
You should address that too, but gambling is frankly a parasitic business meant to exploit such people, and we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good by avoiding the re-abolishment of such a pernicious industry.
Because when it comes to the underlying psychological causes of homelessness and drug addiction and school shootings and violent extremism my impression is we don’t really do much.
I am not sure what you are saying with homelessness...it isn't some massive baffling issue, someone who doesn't have a house, needs a house so build a house? School shootings...I don't understand how anyone can believe this is normal?
The US has fairly obvious social problems, these essentially inhibit the functional resolution of most of these problems you list. However, gambling is not like this, the solution to problem gambling is (obviously) regulating gambling so that it is possible for the government to control people's behaviour. Simple.
Homelessness? Build houses. Drug addiction? Get people clean, harsh sentences for dealing. School shootings? No guns. Violent extremism? Jail. These aren't real problems. Most of the world does not have issues with this stuff (I will accept through drug usage in the US appears to be so ingrained in culture, that it would never be possible for anyone to do anything to fix it...the solutions are known however). It is only over the last ten years or so where government has appeared totally unable to do anything because of paralyzing social discord.
A school shooting happens. You don't want to ban guns. So you say "switzerland doesn't have this problem, we need to address the mental health issues that are driving these young men to kill" as a distraction. Nobody's got a workable plan to do that, so you do nothing - which is what you wanted to begin with.
There are lots of rough sleepers. You don't want to build more houses. So you say "many homeless people are estranged from their support network by mental health issues and addiction, we need to address this underlying cause" as a distraction. Nobody's got a workable plan to do that, so you do nothing.
> Build houses.
That doesn't solve homelessness, as we build many houses in America but they aren't being filled with the homeless. You need to apply social services in a complex systematic approach to provide housing that people can afford sustainably, and rehabilitate and integrate people into society. You might think that is a bit of a bad faith "gotcha" like, of course you have to make the housing free and ensure homeless people know it's available. But it's not a small detail to elide, even in context, and doing so is exactly why your thinking is off-base. You haven't even begun to unpack it properly, putting aside the falsehoods. Think about it, what do you do if someone doesn't want to accept the housing for complex reasons like pride or embarrassment? What if it's some crust punk kid riding suicide as a rite of passage? You have to deal with a lot of that! You can't just ignore it!
> Get people clean, harsh sentences for dealing.
Punitive measures have proven to be a complete and total failure globally. Even in Asia, where penalties on all sides of the drug trade are high, drug usage is very easy to find and rising. I say this as someone connected to Asia and with a fair amount of "street smarts" that some seem to lack. Japan and Korea don't even try to hide it anymore. Chinese cities are kept clean through a complex system of travel controls and consistent policing to sweep things under the rug. It's easy to score if you pass as Chinese outside of the tier 1 and 2 cities though. Even Saudi Arabia is flooded with black market drugs if you know where to look. Punitive measures empirically do not work.
> Violent extremism? Jail
Where is that not the case? Like what are you talking about? Do you know how common attempted domestic terrorism was against the US power grid and cell towers in 2020/2021? No, you don't. Almost nobody does, and certainly nobody has an exact number. That's because it was kept very quiet and the thousands of incidents were suppressed from the media cycle while the people involved were quietly thrown into the maximum security incarceration hole never to be seen again.
The person you're replying to is right. These issues are solved, and it means looking at why people want to do any of this to begin with and addressing that. You cut it off at the behavioral source. Think of it like this, do you check every pointer before you dereference it? No. You avoid bad pointer dereferences primarily through proper structure of your code.
You almost tap into this with being cognizant of the fact that it's not universal. It depends greatly on the country and culture. Because some countries and cultures have done a much better job at building worthwhile, healthy societies than others.
Where can I read more about this?
[1] - https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2023-05/23_Summer-A...
Who said it doesn't? How well do you understand the law of supply and demand when you don't know what a price floor is? Ignoring that, do you think someone on the street can afford even a $1000 home? That's before we set aside that this of course only works if the houses being built are being done in a way that actively encourages prices to go down, rather than feed real estate speculation and continue to float a culture that sees a home as a capital asset.
So no. Building houses alone does not solve homelessness, again as evidenced by the fact that houses are built all the time in America, and homelessness is not getting better. How did you miss that?
Using ideologically charged words like "corporate gambling" and "neoliberal origins" are fun ways to get the moral outrage going of market skeptics but they don't lead to good policy.
The boring answer is you need to look at how the owner of these instruments (since that's what most of these are) are making money. In the same way that a regulated exchange makes sure you're not dumping garbage onto order books, you need to make sure that the bets are fair and that there's generally positive EV. Prediction markets are a good example of this that isn't predatory but sports books are. Unfortunately this article, as is usual for most of the moral outrage genre, doesn't make this distinction.
There's always been gambling in my lifetime. There's been legal ones like Indian Casinos and Vegas. Then there's been the below board ones, the private blackjack games, the mahjong parlors in shady parts of town, lottery players (it's okay if the government profits off the losers I guess lol), etc
If this article were talking about banning sports books and adding in regulation around retail betting then sure that would be a fun discussion. But hyperbole like the article and your copious use of exclamation points doesn't inspire confidence.
If you're just targeting sports books I think other than the folks making money from the industry, you'll find few fans. They offer predatory parlays with often outright negative EV or very high variance returns. They kick sophisticated money out they can find edges. They leave no room for above board players like market makers providing liquidity through efficiency.
I think a better article and discussion could emerge from just tackling the harms of sports books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...
Do you enable the majority who can manage risk, knowing some will be destroyed by it or deny it to everyone to protect the minority who can’t?
In a couple decades, they'll be a massive drag on society and could even collapse countries. France is kind of a good example of how that future will look like.
Problem for you maybe. A life lived in fear is not worth living at all
If you really really want to gamble then go, travel to Nevada and do it.
The problem is sticking their filthy ads and purchased propagandists into the faces of vulnerable people and society at large.
Preying on victims over the phone, soc. media ads, bought manipulators so called influencers with no morale.
What is it about gambling that people find bad while other advertising for harmful stuff gets a free pass?
It might be something we should treat more like smoking.
- Require a disclosure of the EV of each bet as the user is placing it. E.g.: Expected loss $5.
- Ad targeting restrictions.
The demand will always be there but there should be strong incentives to not incentivize use (e.g., the Purdue Pharma debacle). We're better served by having these markets addressed by legit players rather then criminal cartels.
I'm not sure what the best solution is, but unfettered promotion to consume is not the way.
Surely, like murder, and other negative outcome behaviors, we can reduce the occurrences, right?
Maybe a better law: check id, you are not allowed to take from any gambler more than 10 bets a year and no bet can be over 1k.
For big gamblers, we can have "qualified gamblers" rules like we do for qualified investors.
Funny how we don't let average people invest in some stuff but we let them gamble.
For offshore gambling pursue them aggressively if they serve US clients.
This is actually a take I haven't seen elsewhere. Yes, we do protect investors at least marginally better (lots of people still get fleeced with little recourse, unfortunately) but conceptually, this is a very interesting idea.
The fact that gambling exists on a loophole of being "for entertainment purposes only"[0] isn't a good enough distinction to me.
[0]: This is a brief one sentence summary of it. There's actually a bit of nuance involved depending on a number of factors, but essentially the core presume rests on some version of this.
I would hope that I don't need to explain why this isn't a good idea. But the one you may not have thought of: gambling companies love this because small companies are unable to audit, margins in the sector collapsed when activity moved online, that has stopped AND they are able to target customers who they don't want to deal with, before these rules it was difficult to identify customers who would take their money, now they have your passport, your address, your bank statements, they know where your money comes from (professional gamblers can still use beards but in the UK, students used to be very popular beards...that has stopped, regulators have also brought in rules to prevent beards being used as part of the changes above...the "neoliberal" US doesn't have rules anywhere close to this, it is complete madness).
I agree, giving up that much information to a third party, opens too many risks for me, and I don't want it to be standard.
However, I'm sure there is some middle ground here that isn't so violating to your privacy. Like mentioned before, having a default limit that can only be surpassed if you're willing to go through some form of qualification. The limit can be set in place without any audit required, if its low enough.
You realise that people waste their money on things that are significantly less understandable than gambling. Do you see someone driving a Ferrari and seethe with rage because Ferrari doesn't run a "qualified driver" program?
Either way, Ferrari is selling cars. Not dreams of riches.
Just fucking ban it.
Decriminalize low value bets between average people maybe but there's zero reason we need a gambling industry.
It is impossible for this industry to behave. Just kill it.
Your average Fent dealer isn't this predatory FFS
You can block it at payment rails. The reasonable amount of avoidance of controls around gambling laws is not zero [1]. You're making it hard for all but the most determined, who are free to lose it all.
[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... (Control-F "This extends beyond payments") Broadly speaking, we are not "solving" gambling with these ideas; we are, as a society and sociopolitical economic system, pulling levers to arrive at the intersection of harm reduction and rights impairment. Some gambling, but only so much, for most but not all.
(work in finance, risk management, fintech/payments, etc)
Source 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...
No they won't, because moving real money to and from these shady offshore websites is a nightmare, and without enforcement there will be too much fraud in the system for the vast majority of regular people to bother.
Gambling is so prevalent today because 1) there is incessant advertising, including being overlaid on the game you are watching and 2) it is convenient, taking like 3 clicks and under a minute to go from scratch to placing bets. You can even use Apple Pay. Take away either of these and participation rates will plummet.
You don't even need to speculate, just look at the numbers. There were countless illegal and gray market gambling options available a decade ago, both online and in-person. How many people were participating back then? I personally didn't know anyone who bet on games outside of maybe the occasional trip to Vegas, and that too was just for the novelty of it. Today >50% of adults in the US are regularly betting online, and the number is growing every year.
The rise of gambling in the US does indicate an economic hopelessness that mirrors Argentina, but it’s not quite to the same level yet.
If I give out free dope, I'll get a lot of people hooked. If I give out free sports betting, but you get nothing, then nobody is hooked.
It’s similar to weed legalization 10 years ago. Yes, it’s now much less likely that your weed will be spiked with meth or you will be robbed by your dealer, but also like 1000% more of the population smokes weed now and it has some bad social side effects that people don’t like to think about.
I think in both cases, as with prohibition, making something commonplace illegal again tends to make people do crazy things if they’re addicted, and I’d bet gambling is no different
But variance, not expectation, is where casinos get their edge. The “Gambler’s ruin”[0] demonstrates that even in a fair game the Casino will win due to their effectively infinite bankroll compared to the player.
You can also simulate this yourself in code: have multiple players with small bankrolls play a game with positive EV but very high variance. You’ll find that the majority of players still lose all their money to the casino.
You can also see this intuitively: Imagine a game with a 1 in a million chance to win 2 million dollars, but each player only has a $10 bankroll. You can easily see that a thousand people could play this game and the house would still come out ahead despite the EV being very much in the players favor.
None of these companies should be worth a billion dollars.
My big fear is these companies are all getting rich which means they'll be able to buy political influence.
I'm pretty tolerant of a lot of vices. I also don't really have a problem with low levels of gambling. But the way these companies are setup is just sick. It's abusive the the public and erosive to society in general.
Addictions are a symptom of having an excessive amount of free time, floating money and lack of fear of reprisal from family and society and lack of basic wisdom.
Excessive prosperity breaks social rythm. It removes dependencies and relations across individuals. It's like a tree turned into chips, with freedom for every chip. As individuals, you won (materialistic luxury etc), but as a family, community or country, you fail.
Those who have no prosperity are often the ones gambling, not the rich. When SS checks come in, our local casino fills with chain smoking seniors pulling levers on the slot with all their retirement security. It’s a sad addiction.
Theres too many moving parts in your very short paragraph, to actual engage with without any substantial engagement being minced into woodchips, I fear.
Theres many things that have happened since the 40s, just to name ONE thing that has resulted in this - we have much better psychological technology than we did ever before. Skinnerian conditioning, reward schedules, their results - we never had that.
MS Excel alone would mean we better ways for the statistically inclined to zero in on more attractive addictions, just through better data analysis.
Just consider how common place and obvious A/B testing is. How do you think humanity will fare on average, against industrial strength siren songs?
The accumulated social rot is not compensated by Excel sheets or any gadget toys, you call as tech.
Sure, or any of the other million reasons people get addicted, like despair, or other healthier activities being too expensive. Super weird take.
>there were hardly any addicts among peasant communities in rural third world countries back in the 70's or 80's.
Are you sure the assertion is wrong?
How do you know?
"I grew up in a rural setting in the third world," would be a great answer.
But even putting that aside, gluttons, drunkards, and gamblers are certainly ancient and well attested, certainly in the western (abrahamic/hellenic) tradition. Perhaps there are some societies without this but it not poverty or want or lack of abundance that provides relief.
Professional (and collegiate) athletics has always been corrupt - now it’s just more visible.
The only thing needing abolishing is the advertising of gambling.
I certainly feel that people should be able to do it if they really want to, but making it super accessible and highly advertised seems like a bad idea.
Neither accessibility or advertising impacts rates of addiction. It is a real addiction. Does a lack of advertising stop heroin use? Behave.
Additionally, the curtailment of cigarette advertising wasn't because it was understood to be bad, it was because a bunch of politicians found it to be politically beneficial to "do something" so they threw everything at the wall. Increased taxes, counter advertisement, advertising bans, smoking bans in certain places, required packaging, etc. Who knows what actually worked, if any of it did.
We're seeing a big decline in alcohol consumption right now in younger generations right now and none of those things were done to cause it.
Your definition of coercive is too permissive, so it ends up being more of an ideological stance, but its a saturday, so its a fun argument to work through.
If something is coercive, its inherently aiming to generate an unfair transaction. That means we need to spend a ton of effort on forums where such unfair transacations can be reversed, and punitive measures applied.
Otherwise we are always going to fail as a society, simply because coercive technqiues will be the default. Any new business, discovery, or product which provides a net benefit without defending itself from predatory practices will be torpedoed. resulting in a moribund economy and culture.
Having gone through what you have, I suspect you quietly prefer people learning from your example, over discovering the same lessons by following in your foot steps.
The UK went through almost everything the US is going through right now some years ago, where problem gambling led to suicides and people struggling to pay bills. Multiple measures have been taken that seem to have directly helped that situation: VIP programs have been scrapped; advertising is being limited; and, you may have to prove you can afford to bet the levels you're betting at to an operator, which is an incredibly unpopular move (who wants to send their pay slips to their bookie?), but does seem to have quelled things a little.
However there is more to do, and there is something you can do right now if you are losing money and want to reduce the impact these products have on you.
Stop playing casino and video slot games. Focus on sports only.
The myth is that the problem gamblers are losing their money on 2nd Division Nigerian netball games in the middle of the night. Yes, there are some people who are looking for sports action all the time, but that's not the biggest source of problems.
With sports, you have a little time to think. I recommend not playing in-play unless you have automated that solution to find EV and its executing for you (I know people who make money doing this on Betfair in the UK). Bet before game only, and you will have a built-in "cool off" period.
You don't get that with casino games or video slots. Its relentless, and you can lose thousands an hour before you even realise what is happening.
And then, there's EV. Expected Value. Sometimes (actually, kinda often), the odds a bookmaker puts up are a bit wrong.
Not every price, it might be a prop bet on a particular player, and they're putting a price up on a Monday for a Saturday game, and you have a spreadsheet that dings something and tells you what the kelly stake should be and you put 1% of your bankroll on it, and then you might sell it back on Saturday morning when the market has got right or you let it ride (and there's maths to tell you when to do that and when not), and you ride some variance but make money.
That's not possible on casino or video slot games. They just bleed you. There is no EV. If you win, you got lucky (the scientific name for this is "experienced positive variance"), and you should run away quickly before you lose it back. But the sure way to win on those games is the same as in Wargames: don't play at all.
I'm biased, I realise that, but I would love to see the outlawing of casino and slot games on mobile.
I would also like to see more education in schools around probability and statistics (the founder of SIG, a storied institution who is now a market maker on Kalshi, the prediction market platform), argues that the fascination with calculus in schools might have helped during the space race, but today we need people to really understand Bayes theorem more than anything else. I agree.
If you want to start your own education in how to bet a little smarter and lose a little less, I can recommend The Logic of Sports Betting [0] and its sequel Interception [1]. I also like Dan Abrams' book [2], that talks about expected growth, not just exepcted value.
These are not get rich quick schemes, but it will give you an idea of what goes on in the minds of people who try and take this all very seriously. You'll still need to think about modelling and how to get your own prices to compare with those you're being offered, but if you're not prepared to do that work, what is it you're actually doing?
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Sports-Betting-Ed-Miller/dp/109...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Interception-Secrets-Modern-Sports-Be...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/But-How-Much-Did-Lose-ebook/dp/B0DRZ2...
Some bookmakers are marketing companies that will kill unprofitable accounts, but not all of them. It does not take a lot of work and research to work out who is who if you want to take this seriously, or how to make sure your account stays under the radar long enough, or even how to get around those mechanisms - some of those techniques may ultimately be considered fraud, however.
And if you don't want to take it seriously, what are you doing throwing huge wads of cash at it?
Apologists for that practice claimed there was no harm in it, but now we see the harm - a generation of young men trained on those that is now older and ruining their financial future on sports betting.
This is exactly what it felt like to work in crypto.
Don’t expect anything to change anytime soon
Which is a fun novel conflict of interest because he’s also ultimately the executive in charge of making sure national elections are properly conducted.
Since this is the direction America is going, why not have judges take bets on the outcome of trials? Would be a nice income stream for them, and it would save taxpayer money when judges don’t need to be paid anymore.
Gambling , especially in person gambling such as poker is basically a toned down version of combat sports where you are socially allowed to take something from somebody else because the other person accepted the conditions by sitting at the table or entering the casino.
Much like a boxer accepts the risk when they enter the ring.
The same thing happens on your beloved stock market, you just don't see it.
No way. It's almost like these are addictive products being engineered to be as addictive as possible and deliberately punch people's brains in such a way to make them stay. That's so weird.
The exact same argument could be used to make social media illegal.
Limiting social media to be only used for communication, and not algorithms is a good thing.
No-one can use social media because some people in our society can't control themselves. Socialise the losses.
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2025/05/430011/yes-social-media-mi...
You know I'm right here, if you have an actual rebuttal and not just dismissive hand-waving.
> No-one can use social media because some people in our society can't control themselves.
I think a lot of people would be measurably better off if not for social media that algorithmically fucks with their brains.
> Socialise the losses.
I mean that's kind of the point of a society yeah? We pool our efforts to enable greater labor specialization and to achieve things no individual can. Like an electrical grid or a highway system. And when parts of those systems break down, we all contribute a little to sorting them out.
To label such activity as a tax on the poor is nothing more than a euphemism. I understand what is being said by the verbiage "tax" in this context. Although no real tax is voluntary.
Labeling this as an issue that disproportionately affects poor is misleading. This is an issue for a few select individuals who make poor decisions. The correlation for poor decisions and lower disposable income is higher than the contrary.
Wealthy by all means have the ability to wager more than they can afford. Often times, they wager significantly higher than average income individuals; however, they stay within their means
- fanduel owns networks. So what?
- gambling taxes = corporate taxes in MD. This is misleading as state level corporate are effectively $0
- 20% of Americans have placed a bet. So?
I have never done sports gambling myself but this article fails to convince that it’s a problem
Turns out the darkest timeline is also the dumbest.
https://www.nme.com/news/back-to-the-future-writer-reveals-b...
1. Gambling is a real addiction. It is quite strange that someone using the term "Addiction Markets" fails to understand this. People who are gambling addicts were gambling before it was legal, they were just getting their legs broken in a way that was non-visible to you.
2. If you ban gambling, the ability of people to gamble online is not reduced in any way. None. The US offshore market was the biggest sports gambling market in the world before it was legalised. Not even close.
3. I would take a close look at how offshore gambling operators work before casting aspersions about onshore. Onshore, providers are working with regulators to an extremely significant degree. Offshore, sites will advertise that you can gamble on their site if you are on an onshore ban list. If onshore providers are so terrible, why is this the case?
4. The attempt to say that lotteries are addictive is just nonsense. Generally, there is a very poor understanding of what gambling addiction is (again, point 1). Certain games are designed to appeal to gambling addicts (again, the most prevalent ground for these was...the US...before online gambling was legal, biggest market by far, almost all the large companies making these games come from the US), those games are harmful. Lottery, sports gambling, raffles, DFS, etc. lack all of these properties. In particular, providers will often use virtual events (virtual horse-racing) to try to mimic the properties of more addictive products (with relatively little success)...because the original thing is not as appealing to addicts.
5. It is correct that the UK has "stake limits" (not quite sure what the author thinks this...all regulated US providers also have these, some states also have deposit acks...which would be beyond the UK standard, I would say many US states are ahead of the UK) but this is only on certain kinds of machines. The author spills a huge amount of words, talks about Trump, talks about the 1980s...but doesn't seem to talk about these machines, which are more prevalent in the US, at all. The author doesn't say anything about the issues in the UK being the same. VIP programs in the UK aren't regulated in any way different to the US (providers have no market lists). There is one important difference: in the UK, the government has given gambling providers that powers to perform extensive background checks, they take your income, an audit of your assets and then decide whether you can use their product...people opposed to gambling never mention this. How does that fit with neoliberal? A company being given the same powers as regulators?
6. There is an issue with corruption in the US. There is no coincidence that the law on online gambling changed within a few months of one of the largest donors blocking this. Both sides benefitted from this as the largest Democrat donor in those years was the Las Vegas casino workers union. Again, because this corruption meant that some kinds of gambling didn't happen...no mention. This was, we now know, hundreds of billions in value generated by paying politicians hundreds of millions a year...no mention.
7. The author appears to be unaware that DFS existed after UIGEA, not "laughable"...just a basic understanding of the sequence of events.
8. Gambling is not inherently addictive. Many things that are legal in the US are not only inherently addictive, but are inherently harmful. Liberals care about you losing your money when you buy a $5 scratch-off, they don't care about you losing your mind with mind-bending psychoactive substances.
It's hard to take anything you say seriously if you insist on being this disingenuous. You could just as easily say "Liberals care about people being financially ruined and driven into homelessness, but they don't care about you sharing a doobie on the weekend with your bros."
> Gambling is not inherently addictive.
What do you reckon makes gambling go from not inherently addictive to a real addiction?
I don't get it. Somehow, them being underage makes it better and not worse??