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Comment by crankylinuxuser | Hacker News Reader

It's certainly an interesting judgement.. Whereas Congress can "regulate" and not at the same time. Long story short, it looks like more gambling is in.

And the longer view, is more people will be impoverished with more easy to obtain gambling. Sure, a few will win it big, and they will be flaunted out for the city/state/US to see. But on whole, more people will be harmed with this.

But I'm sure it shovels money around sufficiently, making the GDP look like it grew by a .1% Good 'ol "Parable of the Broken Window", at it again.

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It's always a difficult balancing act between "We need to protect this large diverse group with a huge difference in opinions and actual behaviors" and "Liberty (TM)"

How about this: Gambling is legal, write your representatives about sponsoring a bill requiring X% of gains by casinos/bookies to be sent towards funding addiction recovery programs? Is it perfect? No. Is it something that will help? Yes.

Vice legislation is hard, but there's no proper morality in telling people, "no you idiot, I know better than you and you can't have this thing you want". (Unless those people are children, in which case no, they can't have this thing they want). Some people can occasionally do drugs, gamble, or visit a brothel. Some people can't. Saying that the percentage of people unable to handle access to their vice means that nobody should get it feels wrong to me.

I would also posit a large difference between gambling, and corporatized "we use teams of psychologists and best gamification we know" in conjunction with easy access to your money to deprive as many users as possible.

There are people who would and do gamble on anything. In the end, you can't stop them. You can only criminalize after the fact. But that's starkly very far away from bling-bling flashy casino, with weird 'ingame currency' to disconnect understanding of currency costs, and every game in the book to increase revenue.

And the commissioner report I linked to states only negatives on things like electronic gambling. They contribute nothing good, and many bad.

Gambling is fun.

>And the longer view, is more people will be impoverished with more easy to obtain gambling

As long as they are doing it out of their own choice it is nobody's business.

Eh...no?

Addictions in general tend to breed other, more problematic crime. Nobody feels bad for a junkie who blows all their own money and privately ODs in the street. People get really freaked out when a junkie is robbing people in the street to pay for his fix.

> Nobody feels bad for a junkie who blows all their own money and privately ODs in the street.

Where did you hear this from?

Addiction affects the lives of everyone around the addict. Whether we're paying for it in taxes, or we're being attacked on the street.

Not exercising and getting fat also affects lives of everyone around the fat person, does that mean we should force individuals to exercise every day ?

Also it is much better if the addicts are identified early and quickly so that people could stay away from them and shun them instead of a woman figuring out her husband is an addict after the marriage. After gambling addiction next what sugar addiction or netflix addiction ?

It absolutely is "somebody's business", when the state is either running it, or enabling it with heavy legislation.

Banning gambling outright is an obvious way to make gambling black market. But we can take commission reports like this ( https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/ngisc/reports/7.pdf ) and determine best practices how to minimise gambling's impact.

1. Commission recommends that states, tribal governments, and pari-mutuel facilities ban credit card cash advance machines and other devices activated by debit or credit cards from the immediate area where gambling takes place.

2. (State, local, tribal) they should recognize that, especially in economically depressed communities, casino gambling has demonstrated the ability to generate economic development through the creation of quality jobs.

3. (States, localities, tribal) should recognize that lotteries, Internet gambling, and non-casino electronic gambling devices do not create a concentration of good quality jobs and do not generate significant economic development. (Think of this as video slots in corners at gas stations)

Unless we move it into a class of things which include for example, public health or public safety, in general things that place a huge burden on a large number of individuals for the sake of a small number of individual beneficiaries. For example, we limit the claims that people can make for medicines, we don't require that individuals research every medicine that they take.

Maybe the danger of sports betting is so concealed that we can't expect that the bulk of consumers can realize that danger until they have already been hurt (I'm not making that claim.) Wouldn't you expect a government to regulate in that case?

The longer view is that if gambling should be illegal at the federal level then congress needs to pass a law making it illegal at the federal level.

I usually consider gambling a form of entertainment. By that note, it's no more impoverishing than anything else people blow their money on for their own amusement. Some people have a gambling problem and spend more than they can afford because they expect they'll win eventually, but unwise spending is hardly unique to gambling.

While I generally share your sentiment, there's plenty of evidence that gambling is addictive in nature. It's not just a matter of "unwise spending" for those addicted, in the same way an expensive hobby might be.

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