Ask HN: When / Why / How did gambling become legal and everywhere? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: When / Why / How did gambling become legal and everywhere?

2 pointsevo_98 comments

In the past 6-12 months it seems that online gambling has exploded. It's disgusting to see it advertised non-stop, in our faces pretty much everywhere, but particularly bad in sports.

I was watching the hockey game last night, and they had a segment on the betting, the odds and how fanduel was just their favorite betting app... seriously disgusting... why is this even legal? Why are they talking about it on the air as part of their coverage? Why is every commercial someone really famous pushing this crap? In hockey, you've got Connor McDavid and Wayne Gretzky shilling for them; every sport has a ton of well establish pros pushing this crap. Just bizarre to see. To really get a sense of how odd this is, just change gambling to weed and imagine how that would look.

I'm sure the answer is 'the gambling community took a shit-ton of their money and dumped all over lobbyist to achieve their shity goals...'. But really, what can be done to reverse this? Like who wanted this other than the gambling industry?

Is there any way to put this genie back in the bottle? Any groups working to reverse this bs?

One factor was that online sports betting became widespread in the UK with the perception that nothing terrible happened. It’s already happened in the US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_NBA_betting_scandal

But people act is if it never happened. Personally my view is that pro basketballis basically illegitimate because so much depends on the judgement of the ref. Even in the pickup game getting away with fouls is a core skill and it just gets more important as you go up.

Same reason as weed: if you legalize it you can tax it.

Also, I really don't see the problem with gambling. It's a game. People can do what they want with their time and money.

> People can do what they want with their time and money. This is precisely what people cannot do unless law of their country/state/etc... explicitly allows them to do. Gambling is illegal in many US states (though number is decreasing as more and more politicians are being bought by lobbyist). The problem is of course that gambling is in large number of cases an addiction that ruins families, causes suicides etc... and we tend to write laws to prevent this type of thing, otherwise cocaine and heroin and opioids and mdma and ... would also be legal :)

Do you have data for this "large number of cases"? Large how? Large compared to what?

You're being surprisingly thick. My comment of course applied to things that were legal. If gambling is legal what's the moral high ground to judge people who gamble exactly?

Online gambling has a lot of guardrails to help people not go too far. Doesn't always work but I would like to see some numbers fueling your outrage.

lmgtfy (there are two million gambling addicts in the US alone and this number is like 3-4x that): https://onlinedegrees.unr.edu/blog/gambling-addiction-resour....

and also I am not sure where you are getting that I am "outraged" :) there are many things that are legal that probably shouldn't be and are only legal because right people put money into the right hands to make them legal. the question posed in this thread was whether there is something that can be done to reverse that

It is very difficult to tax illegal gambling and its illegality never stopped it, just kept them from advertising.

Ah, thank you, I should have realized that. Same thing with weed, basically but weed generally doesn’t destroy families.

I think most radio stations (especially sports radio stations) would basically collapse without gambling and boner pills commercials… The “funny” aspect of the legal gambling to me is that we never hear about it from even the most conservative corners of this country which is very telling just how successful lobbying has been to make it “normal”

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