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Comment by nightsd01 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly this is a good thing, and we should ban online sports and casino betting in the US too. They add absolutely zero value to society, they just cause harm.

Studies have shown that most of the profit from online sports gambling for example comes from people with gambling addictions. These companies are just greedily sucking away money from vulnerable people. These companies really do ruin lives and destroy families.

I can see that maybe prediction markets might offer at least SOME value to society, so if I were made global dictator tomorrow, I wouldn’t ban them right away, but I’d definitely want to see more studies doing a risk benefit analysis.

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Agreed. But as usual you gotta see it in the light of the upcoming elections only 9 days away, meaning they had over 3½ years to do something about the snowballing societal crisis and never lifted a finger. Quite the opposite actually, as Lula's deeply corrupt government actually issued the pending regulatory decree for betting sites and thus effectively cleared them to operate legally in the country

Bolsonaro was the one who opened the floodgates for betting sites after Temer's law though.

Another problem, at least here in Brazil, it's just it created a bubble in ad market. TV, soccer clubs are all betting. Nothing more. Even news channels have betting ads.

This imo totally distort the ad market, and you have companies with smaller capital (like retail) or younger companies who can't compete with bet money. This hurts real economy SO bad.

Cimed (Brazilian pharma) CEO just said today that he is going to sponsor soccer clubs now.

Let alone how it made a lot of people in debt, and this is hurting consumption a lot. The retail market was heavily favorable to the ban because of this.

Oh, there's also "cartels" like PCC and CV that are involved with it.

And the algos they use to drive people harder to gamble are particularly pernicious. It isn't just putting slot machines in their way when they're walking to the washroom. It's high-pressure psychological tactics that are hard for non-addictive people to ignore, let alone gambling addicts.

It's utterly evil, and destroys lives and families. This shit needs to go.

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