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mensetmanusman

Gambling is like drug use, some people are clearly addicted to it and will ruin their lives over it.

How does society respond to this fact? War on drugs, war on gambling, etc.

Hmmmmm

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No, we just legalize gambling, just like we should legalize drug use.

People should be free to use drugs, drink alchool, or gamble.

Right. As long as we also we have hard measures to deal with those whose personal choices begin impacting their fellow citizens.

Would you provide an example?

We do, they are called laws.

For the most part agreed but should companies be able to use psychological tricks and techniques to get people using drugs, alcohol, and gamble?

You just described Facebook

Or, instead of declaring war on it, you can regulate it like we do with legal drugs. Ban advertising in most venues, print a disclosure of the dangers on every ad and over the door of every establishment, treat it like the danger it is.

state run gaming, limit the bets people make, allow them to "win back" their UBI

everyone's a winner, baby!

Sadly, state run gambling aka national lotteries typically offer you much worse returns than anything in the casino.

That is because high return games trigger gambling addiction. It is even illegal to run lotteries with too high returns in many places for this reason, casinos doesn't have high returns to be nice to you but because it ultimately nets them a lot more money.

With low return games it is really easy to see that it is a bad investment, while the higher the returns the easier it is for people to think they can make money gambling. You might say those are dumb, but the effect of making high pay-out gambling legal is that you ruin their lives, and in my opinion their lives are worth more than your fun.

This is a case of the trolley problem. You think it is fine to ruin their lives since you didn't do it directly, but since you could save their lives by banning it the effect is that you are ruining their lives by keeping this legal.

>casinos doesn't have high returns to be nice to you but because it ultimately nets them a lot more money.

As far as I can see casinos do have jackpots in the millions for slot machines, and those are legal. Overall those slot machines also offer you better odds per bet than lotteries.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/7-biggest-vegas-payouts-time-...

In this scenario, I’m proposing that you rig it. Hire some of the best loot box designers from the gaming industry to replicate their addictive mechanics, but for the welfare state.

You’d think the state would embrace virtual scratch offs to better understand the amount of addiction they’re causing…

There was a huge push for banning violent video games in the 90’s - the book “Masters of Doom” covers it. John Carmack and John Romero actively fought for it. Before that, people wanted to ban violent movies in the 60’s.

The more I think about government policies pushed by the likes of NYT, it seems indistinguishable from Chinese Communist Party’s clamp on their population. Banning things for the greater “good” of the society. NZ just banned Tobacco/Cigs. This stance of prohibition from progressives is very unamerican and troubling in the context of US’s core values.

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