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Comment by erulabs | Hacker News Reader

0.5% increase in credit delinquency rates over 3 years feels... underwhelming.

I'm not a gambler and I personally find gambling morally questionable and intellectually embarrassing, but golly I'm tired of sports gambling being pointed in a sort of "see, freedom doesn't work!" sort of way.

1% of people will ruin their lives no matter what society does to prevent it. If you have a gambling problem (if it even appeals to you), I would as a _friend_, recommend you seek help; but as your fellow citizen? Up to you.

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It was banned most everywhere, then with no public debate on the subject, much less consensus, all of a sudden it was legal and in your face wherever you went. If it's going to be made legal, it needs to be justified, rather than there needing to be justification for making it illegal. I personally think it would have a high bar to overcome.

Here's the justification; it's my money and I'll spend it how I like

We have many restrictions on what spend our money on. You can't buy illegal drugs, you can't pay someone to kill someone else. You can't buy many different substances without permission of the govt like certain explosives. Some states have limits on buying (or using) lockpicking tools (often called pick lock tools in the law) unless you have certain permissions, like being an active locksmith.

So we have limits on what you buy. Also you can't buy booze if you are underage. You can't buy a gun without a background check.

Those restrictions are morally wrong other than the one about murder

Try flipping it around: The question becomes when you can start a casino and accept other people's money.

If I recall correctly, the ban wasn't on you betting with your friend group, but on casino accepting your bets.

So regulate it, don't ban it

> If it's going to be made legal, it needs to be justified, rather than there needing to be justification for making it illegal.

Huh, why?

> It was banned most everywhere, then with no public debate on the subject, much less consensus, all of a sudden it was legal and in your face wherever you went.

They didn't change any laws, did they? So it was as legal earlier as it is now, isn't it? It's just that someone found the right loophole that was always there.

> They didn't change any laws, did they? So it was as legal earlier as it is now, isn't it? It's just that someone found the right loophole that was always there.

In the US, it was banned in most places until 2018. The Supreme Court invalidated the ban that had been in place until then.

> The Supreme Court invalidated the ban that had been in place until then.

The Supreme Court interprets existing law, don't they?

> Huh, why?

The opposite change was already justified, it would obviously be ridiculous to have to constantly rejustify every law in our society.

> They didn't change any laws, did they? So it was as legal earlier as it is now, isn't it? It's just that someone found the right loophole that was always there.

I do not know nor do I particularly care.

> The opposite change was already justified, it would obviously be ridiculous to have to constantly rejustify every law in our society.

They didn't change any laws.

I recall plenty of debate. Maryland voters voted to legalize gambling because politicians said the funds would go to education. It was a ballot initiative that won a majority vote.

But I guess all the states in the union aren't as well governed as Maryland.

Well governed?

Evidence suggests easily fooled voters, although some $6.8 billion USD has flowed from Maryland casinos to the Maryland Education Trust Fund since 2010, educators on the ground are still asking when the airconditioners ordered a decade past will arrive.

* https://marylandeducators.org/where-did-the-gambling-money-g...

* https://www.mdgaming.com/marylands-casinos/revenue-reports/

It would appear there's a major leak in the Education Trust Fund.

In general, not on this specific topic.

> It would appear there's a major leak in the Education Trust Fund.

Or they redirected funding that previously went to education to other budget items. If a trust fund is created to send $7B to education, but the government cuts their previous $10B in funding, the trust fund can be perfectly followed, while educators see a $3B cut in their funding.

Apparently very little of the $6 billion that came from the casino's that were approved via voting on the basis that money would go to education ended up in schools.

The funding levels appear to be stagnating, there is no sign of any additional topping up.

It's a dishonest sleight of hand designed to fool the voters who wanted education improvements, voted for a path of action that was promised to deliver .. and did not.

It's clear how the con works, equally clear that it was a con.

"If it's going to be made legal, it needs to be justified" is troubling - it's supposed to work the other direction: unless justified, it should be _legal_. I agree with your sentiment that there should have been a deeper public debate here, but banning gambling seems obviously unconstitutional, regardless of how I feel about it personally.

gambling bans in general would be constitutional. There was a stupid technical issue with the law as written, not with the concept in general.

That problem 1%* isnt just ruining their own lives, it often spreads to everyone around them. Gambling has a lot of externalities that hit other people. Parents gambling takes away resources from children, gamblers engaging in fraud and and identity theft, workplace theft, embezzelment etc. Also strongly linked to higher rates of domestic violence and violent crime. It dispropotionally affects lower socio-economic groups.

*It may be much higher than 1%

https://www.unsw.edu.au/news/2024/10/new-commission-calls-fo...

I personally don't participate in it and don't really find it interesting at all. For the longest time it was fairly normal to bet among friends, but I do know some people who seem to obsess now over sports betting to what feel like unhealthy levels.

I really don't care and I'm definitely on your side where I think people should be allowed to do what they want in this regard.

The crossing of line for me though is that this is now being advertised on TV and practically everywhere and being normalized for children and teenagers.

Call me a cynic, but I think the real goal in the long term for these companies is to get people addicted to it and to normalize it from a young age while they're more impressionable and thats where I believe the true harm is.

Its ubiquity disappoints me because it shows how post-modernist emotionalism has completely overriden objective pragmatism.

The average better in the street is not going to magnitudes less statistical information than the betting company, but he places a bet because he 'feels' that he can predict the outcome.

As a fellow citizen we should stop letting this stuff be advertised and shoved down our throats.

You can barely even watch sports these days without interacting with betting, who is this helping?

If people want to seek out destruction, let them. But don't advertise and glamorize self-destruction by letting these people pay famous people to make their platforms look like the place to be, or have open discussion of their vice embedded in the broadcasting.

Percentage increases, and the phrase "X% more likely", are usually quite ambiguous. I wish more people would tell you whether they mean absolute or relative increases. E.g., if (numbers made up for example) 0.5% of the general population are delinquent in credit, but 1% of gamblers are delinquent, then you could report that as either a 0.5% increase (absolute) or a 100% increase (relative). Which one people choose often has a lot to do with the impression they're trying to give: are they trying to panic you, or give you actual facts?

And knowing the baseline of a relative increase can matter a lot. If something goes from a 0.001% to a 0.002% chance of happening, that relative 100% increase means very little. If it goes from a 50% chance of happening to a 100% chance, that same relative 100% increase means a lot: it's gone from a coin-flip to a certainty.

They used "percentage points" in the article which is the phrase for your "absolute" version. Personally, I would use "absolute" to be phrased as "just over 800,000 adult Americans"

It takes a village. Especially if the problem is systemic and not just the individual. When you count the number of people with some addiction or the other the total represents how many people havent found anything better to do within the system. Thats like finding cells in your brain that are busy looping randomly not fully attached in some useful way to the system. Ofcourse you can zap them and isolate them or remove them but the imaginative solution is reattach them and make them useful to the system in some way. Cause the brains that do will have larger capacities and capabilities than brains that dont.

I was surprised by that too, but maybe we're too early. It's hard to put a precise point on it without hard data, but it just feels like gambling was better when you could do it in two places (Vegas, Atlantic City, maybe to a lessor extent at the horse track) and you had to actually travel there to make a big show of it. And you also felt a little bad about it.

When I turn on sports today it's just in your face gambling all the time. I think we'll come to regret this.

I agree. Ban the advertising and promotion of it, like we do for cigarettes, because the industry is really predatory, but leave people the choice.

As Comedy Central put it. “Sports, brought to you by gambling”.

I don’t disagree on ad regulation but it’s enmeshed now and will be hard to control. Leagues kept their distance because it looked bad, but now seem to embrace it as it must generate a boat load of ad revenue.

Well, 'sports' itself is predatory and causes lots of young people to trash their health for the amusement of onlookers.

I say 'sports' to mean the stuff people watch on TV and in stadiums. You going for a run or kicking a ball with friends is fine. It's audience-driven sports that are bad.

A bit of betting is small fry by comparison.

A few thousand athletes making millions of dollars being amusements for onlookers

tens of thousands of people ruining their financial lives from gambling

The hundred athletes making bank are the tip of the ugly iceberg. Most hopefuls destroy their health for next to nothing.

0.5% total increase seems pretty small to me too. It looks like it's pretty much increasing linearly though, so it's possible that in ten years it will be at 3% or something, which I think would be concerning. It's hard to tell whether that will continue, or whether we'll hit a natural steady state, but it seems like we're not at the steady state yet.

I mean…keep reading.

For the affected population, it’s around 10 percentage points—or double.

So people who sports bet are twice as likely to be delinquent as those who don’t. I’ll give you that the effect is smaller than I expected.

Here’s the thing though…it’s not like that trend is slowing down. The finalization of prediction markets and continued normalization of betting as a pro-social behavior is currently headed to the moon…so we should ask if it’s causing major side effects.

Smoking makes someone 25x more likely to develop lung cancer. Right now it looks like sports betting makes you 2x more likely to be delinquent on your car loan. At what incidence does that become anti-social enough to try to curb?

Sports betting is regulated, prediction markets aren't though. That's a pretty stark difference

There's plenty of regulation around them. But sure, you can ask for even more, or different regulation.

In the US, the CFTC regulated prediction markets. They are more regulated (at a federal level) than gambling.

> 0.5% increase in credit delinquency rates over 3 years feels... underwhelming.

The number works out to just over 800,000 people in the US

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