Legalizing sports betting and online gambling was such a massive mistake. They are sleazy immoral industries that profit on suffering.
But it fundamentally changes sports. Both the amount of money in them, which comes with their own problems (see ManCity's judgement today). But also how players are affected. I know a soccer player in lower divisions getting death threats because someone in another country was gambling on their match. People try to bribe what's basically amateurs etc.
It's a side effect of liberty that people can choose to put themselves into deep suffering. I know people who do the same by blowing all of their money on designer clothes or expensive cars. Nobody is talking about regulating poor people wasting money on those things.
If you earn the money, you're entitled to piss it away. Them's the breaks.
at the same time, it's really not cool for billions of dollars to be spent on research of how to best influence susceptible people (who would otherwise not piss it all away,) to piss all their money away.
ban the predatory advertising and maximally addictive interfaces and most people will be happy. you can still piss your money away if you want to. but it really shouldn't be one poor sap with an addiction vs. a trillion dollar industry trying to exploit that addiction.
Intellectually honest answers only
But this is more about the companies preying on addiction, incentivizing it.
Hi, we live in a society. People who bankrupt themselves out of whatever money they have earned and become a burden to the society at large via homelessness/welfare/crime. Which is also the same case for hard drugs (traditionally this was originally a problem with opiates). I personally do not care if you decide you want to kill yourself with heroin, but I do care as soon as our taxes are used to deal with you as a side-effect.
So making reasonable laws that curtail some of the worst things you can piss your money away on to curb crime/homelessness/welfare/er-bill-delenquency expenditures seems like a wise decision.
Libertarian thinking tries to ignore these side effects but they are real.
isn't this already the case with a lot of things that carry less negative stigma? bankrupcty, limited liability, extreme sports (base jumping, rock climbing, etc), financial risk taking, health choices, bailouts are more socially accepted, but they also risk pushing costs onto the public upon failure.
A heroin/fent/meth addict doesn't die right away, and usually doesn't die until after years of crime/homelessness/welfare. They cost every day until they finally overdose, now with narcan (if they are on an opiate) they can be saved from that overdose (and hopefully rehabilitated) but often that doesn't even stop them.
We have to draw lines somewhere and sports betting, in my opinion is somewhere a line should be re-drawn.
You're welcome to that opinion, but don't pretend that "addiction is a public health issue, gambling addicts have high suicide rates, and many profit from others' addictions" are subjective.
I've personally blocked who knows how many tens of thousands of ads online over the past couple decades. Somehow I doubt my life is lacking for not buying hundreds of extra products I would have learned about from all those targeted ads.
>to manage or influence skillfully, especially in an unfair manner.
I think we can agree that advertisers influence skillfully, given that advertising firms don't typically pick their executives from a pool of unskilled labor. If I were taking your position, I would take issue with the qualifier "unfair" here. After all, what's unfair about showing a product that people are interested in? Isn't that what they want? To be shown things that are interesting? People don't often go to uninteresting movies, or sit through uninteresting lectures. Surely it saves everyone a lot of time to skip through the uninteresting products and get right to the ones that actually make sense for a person to buy.
This is where it gets interesting. Targeted ads a not simply "showing a person something they are interested in, because in order to show something to someone who is interested in it, we have to have a willful expression of that interest. When a person goes to a car dealership, they don't say "hey! It's unfair that you're showing me all these cars!" because, well, they expressed interest in cars by showing up at a car dealership and asking for a person to show them around.
Targeted ads do not take in willful signals. They take in surveillance data. They watch how a person moves and infer things about them; they assess when the right moment of low will power exists, to insert the ad at just the right moment of influence-ability. That is what is unfair about them, because it subverts the social contract around the purchase of goods and services. Instead of making one's product so good that the most number of people will buy it, they follow people around to find the time they are most vulnerable to what they're selling.
I'll repeat an idea I had a while ago, but if countries just had national networks where companies could list their products and services in a way that is highly structured and as systematically scrubbed of bias or psychological manipulation as possible, we would get the best of both worlds. Effortless and non-favoring lookup of what you want, fair comparisons between products, no favoritism to the wealthy, no FOMO or mind tricks.
I'd argue here that a business's marketing budget is going to be effectively unlimited if it's profitable, assuming they have the initial budget to kickstart it which most do. If $10 in ad spend returns $12, you can just keep pouring money into it.
Apart from that yeah you're right that the goal is better product discovery.
Do we treat humans as
1) having full agency, and thus full responsibility for their actions
2) having less than full agency, and then to what extent must society/governments implement control over things that humans can't control within themselves
Because generally, if you subscribe to 1, there is nothing immortal from taking money from a human that that wants to hand it over, provided that human well knows what is at stake. So as long as these websites aren't defrauding the customers with fake stats, there really is nothing wrong.
If you subscribe to 2, then thats a much riskier line to walk because that affects a lot of things, not just gambling.
This is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.
More seriously, it seems like you have an uncommon view about good ways for people to relate to each other. You may recall that humans evolved to live in large, cooperative groups :)
You frame as if agency exists, then exploitive coercion doesn't exist.
We can respect the agency of folks to smoke or drink, while also criminalizing lying to entire populations about the known health effects of your products.
We can respect people as having agency, while also acknowledging that psy-ops like those run by Cambridge Analytica, or even normal psy-ops like mass market advertising, can influence groups of people through deceptive or manipulative ways in aggregate and cause massive harms.
We can respect personal agency while also acknowledging some folks have addiction problems, addictions problems be intentionally manufactured by products and platforms. There is a balance between allowing a poker game, and allowing the MGM Grand to plant a limo driver in a recovering addict's driveway.
We can respect agency while acknowledging those with large reach because of wealth can cause mass harm through media, influence and coercion if unregulated.
We can grant authorities to police and politicians without Qualified Immunity from consequences of their actions.
1. If someone knows all the information, but still chooses to make the wrong decision.
2. Someone is being told wrong or incomplete information, leading them to make the wrong decision
3. Someone is being forced by external means into making an wrong decision.
Two and three are already illegal, under fraud and coersion.
Im solely talking about 1. Because if you don't believe people have full agency in that regard, you have to prove to what extent can you determine what is deception. You can't just willy nilly say that something feels immoral, and therefore should be banned.
If so, would you accept the following as moral actions?
Financial adviser charging substantially above-market fees to recent widows, who lack experience in finance (All information is available, but not understood)
Selling heroin outside of a drug rehab clinic (All information available & understood, but under compromising circumstances)
As long as the financial advisers statement is along the lines of "this is the service I provide, these are my rates", with no lies about saying how his rates are the best or lying about what he can actually do, absolutely no problem.
That doesn't mean that he is of a moral upstanding character, but he certainly shouldn't be banned from setting his own price.
>Selling heroin outside of a drug rehab clinic (All information available & understood, but under compromising circumstances)
This one is tricky, because unlike online sports gambling, this ties into other things.
My answer would still be yes with the following caveats
* The heroin seller is FDA certified and not making the drug at home where he can accidentally mess it up and kill someone that is not expecting to die.
* We have a system of dealing with people effectively who turn to drugs. Id be 100% for state/government funded drug camps where anyone can either voluntarily enter, or get put there if their drug use causes them to be a public nuisance. They can stay there, get shelter and food and basic first aid for free, and get all the drugs they want, with 2 caveats: no advanced medical care (if you OD, or have a heart attack, you die), and the only way to leave is to go through a trial reintegration program where you get support for getting off drugs, get put to work, and do this for a year before being let out.
So, what does it mean to choose something with full agency?
When you see an attractive woman, do you have a choice about whether you think she's attractive?
I would say that is so instinctual as to not be a choice, even though different people have different opinions about who is attractive. And yet we know that men in particular go to great lengths to be with attractive women, some to the point where it becomes an obsession.
What about food? Do you not like things that have a bit of fat, sugar, and maybe some crunch to it? There are clearly people who, despite having all the necessary information, will eat too much, to the point where they become ill from it. How is that a choice?
Its highlighted well in the psychological effect of tossing a coin when you are not sure about something, not to make the choice for you, but to see how you feel about the outcome, which tells you what you really want.
So for someone that overeats, and then feels ill, knowing that would happen, is simply a case of them valuing the enjoyment of food over feeling ill. If they were perfectly logical, without emotions, they would overeat, feel ill, and then not complain about feeling ill because they understood that they did it to themselves and this is a necessary sacrifice for the enjoyment of prior. But because humans are emotional we react to feeling ill with negative emotion, which externally makes it seem like we made the wrong choice, but we didnt.
Also, on a semi-related note - there is the legality of gambling, the legality of running a gambling operation, and the legality of doing so for pecuniary gain, and it is possible for just part of these three to be illegal.
It's hard to respect a legal system that jails someone who wasn't hurting anyone. Repealing a law that criminalizes victimless behavior, especially when so many people already break it, paradoxically increases respect for other laws. It reinforces that the law serves a purpose: protecting people and promoting the general welfare.
Gambling is a victimless crime, if the gambler is a single person with no dependents. Most of the harms are when someone gambles away the family home or their kids' college funds.
Gambling is worse than cannabis. There's no limit, other than your credit, to how much money you can lose gambling. That's not true for cannabis. You can only consume so much and even grow it for free if you need to.
I support legalizing gambling too. Making all gambling illegal drives it underground and allows criminals to profit from it.
But I equally strongly oppose online gambling or gambling advertising (while we're on the subject, I think alcohol advertising shouldn't exist either). You can't smoke or drink anywhere, anytime. Why should gambling be any different? Go to an IRL casino or betting shop or racetrack and gamble. Regulate the hours and locations of these establishments.
Gambling, alcohol, and cannabis aren't good for you. So why allow them to be marketed to people? If they want to gamble (or drink or smoke) they'll find out about it and do it. No need to deliberately try to get people to do it.
We mostly don't criminalize self-harm. Is it really better for those people to be in prison, with violent criminals, and have a record, than be stupid or poor from too much smoking? Who does that help?
Drunk people get into accidents and fights and even commit murder. Cannabis users mostly stay home and snack. And yet we don't lock up people for buying a six-pack.
Blue laws are similar; they delay but do not reduce consumption. However, they have a fantastic pro-social side effect in that they allow workers in affected businesses a day off.
To this end, I would love to see a mid sized municipality experiment with raising minimum wage 10x one day a week and see what kind of culture develops around that.
The list is far longer than you've mentioned.
Here's a list of things you're allowed to profit on either as an investor or as a participant that are quite wild: Fighting with gloves (more lethal than bare-knuckle), bare-knuckle fights, kids in contact sports (even combat sports), throwing away perfectly good food in order to lower taxable income, not planting a crop specifically because it wouldn't make enough profit, gig-economy not paying living wages, a minimum wage below living wage, predatory lending, algorithmic social media that swings elections, targetted advertisement psyops, marketing to children, cosmetic surgery in general but especially for children, forced conversion 'therapy', experimental life saving treatments gate-kept by money, planned obsolescence, plastic packaging...
In combat sports, we're really not too far removed from the collisuem, just that it's "not meant to be to the death" even though it does often result in death or lifelong conditions. The fighters get paid, the organizers get paid, the arena gets paid, the advertisers get paid...All in the name of watching someone not quite kill someone.
Hell, we've even still got slavery tucked neatly away behind "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.", but we know that many sitting in prison are demonstrably innocent. The prison is allowed to require that every inmate works. You're allowed to run an organization that profits from these slaves. You are not legally required to pay in some states.
It's curious to me that so many progressives or soi-disant leftists are in favor of dissolving these types of moral and social traditions while being fervently anti-capitalist. It seems that they (meaning the subset who are always looking for new fenceposts to tear down) are in fact the shock troops of Capital.
Probably. We don't call it prostitution anymore it's now called, "sex work."
Your morals have nothing to do with what others do with their own body.