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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

Pokemon cards have gone full circle, GameStop now has an online service where you can gamble on cards digitally just like lootboxes. You buy a roll at different price points to win a PSA graded card from a set of probabilities, and then you can sell it back for 90% market value to GameStop or have them ship it to you.

The proliferation of gambling over so many domains has radicalized me against it in a way that I didn't think would've been possible a few years ago.

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I have rejected much of my Southern Baptist upbringing - I am pleased that the church I’m now a member of is accepting and affirming of various sexual and gender identities, I have a wide variety of non-Christian friends who I feel no need to convert, and I say a prayer of thanks on a regular basis that I was able to get an abortion without any questions when I had an ectopic pregnancy and support anyone else’s decision about what to do with their own body.

I am right with my late grandfather, a Baptist preacher, on the subject of gambling after watching people back home constantly checking their phones during the college bowl games and periodically sighing and cussing over the performance of teams they had never cared about before.

Between the 24/7 gambling and the easy answers machine being in their pockets (“well, ChatGPT says…”), the resulting brain rot hurts my soul.

Woah, you can sell it back to them? That’s normally the line that isn’t crossed. You sell it at the store next door (pachinko) or on the open market (trading card games and digital items).

> The proliferation of gambling over so many domains has radicalized me against it in a way that I didn't think would've been possible a few years ago.

I grew up in Italy when sport betting was illegal and you had to do it through illegal channels, and I did it now and then like everyone else, and thought we should totally make it legal.

At some point all betting, slot machines etc.. became legal and it's been a disaster and I'm also totally radicalized against it.

The best solution is through education. For example by showing in big letters the return-to-player ratio:

On 100 EUR you will get → 79 back, if you put them again in the machine you will get → 62.41 → 49.30 → 38.95 → 30.77…

While I think education matters, I also think at some point if something is purely negative for society one should restrict it, rather than try to reach an ideal state were people are educated enough to handle it right.

It Is illiberal but I don't see an argument beyond the slippery slope one at this point in my life.

Just trying to get normies to understand that slot machines aren't "hot" and "due" for a jackpot because nobody has won recently is virtually impossible. Stats class is hard and people don't really trust what they've learned anyway. A huge portion of the public even believes in such a thing as a person having "good luck". It's nonsensical, tantamount to believing the god of fortune is going to intercede on your behalf, but people really do think this way.

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