Addiction Markets
thebignewsletter.com
thebignewsletter.com
But if you want to outlaw this harmful activity [licensed gambling], you have to find a way to replace 6.4% of Maryland’s budget, which is slightly less than the entire amount the state brings in from corporate taxes.
Do I misunderstand, or is this just actually incredible?
Property tax's a mixed bag since it taxes both land and building when ideally you only want to tax land.
States that impose income taxes are choosing not to imposes taxes elsewhere like land, which is the ideal tax. Income taxes have negative consequences since you're taxing economic activity.
[Edit: fun fact: threatening to withhold this funding is how the U.S. DOT managed to essentially federalize drinking age of 21. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Dole)]
If there’s a massive burden with addicts, you can still impose that the gambling industry pays more to offset.
This logic always bugs me because no one truly lives in a vacuum. People are flawed and generally need help from a community. A small community can't really fight back a well endowed company like gambling companies. The whole(stated) reason android is losing unsigned side loading is because grandmas in SEA are sideloading gambling apps.
It's obvious to me that gambling is generally a vulnerability in the human psyche. For many, it short circuits something in their brain and forms genuine addiction.
It's actually insane to me to use this vulnerability as a tax base to fund roads and schools, because regardless of the funds, your incentives will still be perverse and those incentives will dictate that more people need to be losing their money to out-of-state firms because a small portion of it might fund roads and schools.
The incentives basically state: "A percentage of our population must become sick and addicted to risk and reward in order for society to function". Is this not basically the concept of Omelas?
Go tell that to joint bank accounts and family court.
Edit: and I know it sounds weird to say that gambling taxes are too high, when one could argue that high taxes are meant to disincentivize a thing - but if that thing is highly addictive, and if no other state action is taken to disincentivize that thing, then it’s actually a really sticky income source for the government who now doesn’t want to get rid of their cash cow. Tobacco ads are outlawed, which did more than taxing tobacco. Gambling ads are absurdly common.
Edit: at least with state lotteries the state gets most of the money so it is more like a tax; in the case of corporate sports betting the corporation takes the money and then pays a small corporate tax on it.
Related concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3735171/
Why should gambling be different?
Sports gambling ads have ruined sports media. State lottery ads are even worse. The government should not spend money to encourage its own citizens to partake in harmful activities.
If there are no ads to tell you, you have to, first, be informed that sports gambling is a thing people do, then decide that it's a thing you want participate in, and then obtain information on how it's done. This adds friction. Friction reduces participation. But if you really want to gamble? You still can.
That should push the shadier operators out of the limelight, though it would likely leave large-pot gaming (sports, Powerball, etc.) standing, at least for a while.
(I'd very much like to hear criticisms of this approach.)
Is it advertising when the announcer for a game talks about gambling? There's statements that obviously would be advertising, so the interesting thing is where and how to draw the line.
If an announcer just wants to talk about gambling, fine, I guess, but I really doubt that there are any announcers that would do much of that.
Most countries will let 18 year olds drink beer in a park.
It can be a real pain to get alcohol without planning in these places.
It takes a little bit of money but you can get a beer at the supermarket.
Do they addicts have to self report to get treatment? Do we force them?
Food, tobacco, alcohol get more interesting... As there is bit harder time to assign blame of each meal. Maybe in those cases the claimants should be able to fully list everything they have ingested over say past 10 years. So that liability can be fairly and exactly distributed.
Betting companies employ all the tricks to make you a gambler. The more you loose, the more they target you. And if the gambler atops playing they literally go put of their way to nake them relapse.
No ads on TV/Radio. Mandated warnings. In some countries, packaging must carry prominent health warnings, in some cases excluding virtually all branding (Australia, for example).
That along with high taxation, smoking cessation programs, legal proceedings against tobacco companies, restrictions on retailling, etc., have drastically reduced smoking rates in many countries.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_smoking#Public_policy>
That move alone would make a big dent in many of the major problems of modern living.
Side remark: I love to ridicule that of all things producers of very unhealthy food and beverages (or to put it more directly: producers of foods and drinks that make you fat and thus unathletic) love to sponsor sports events. :-)
I don't have a problem with people smoking or drinking, but I agree we shouldn't allow advertising. However, they should be able to advertise in adult only outlets.
ex: Does Playboy still have Cigarette and Liqour advertisements?
> I'm fairly pro-market, but I agree with this. I think people should do what they want if they don't harm themselves or others.
"You're pro-market? Why do you support letting children buy cocaine!?!"
This has minimum impact on personal liberty, and will almost eliminate problem gambling.
It's one thing to put a slightly higher number and the number box each time, it's another to do identity theft or coaxing your spouse into letting you play as them.
> The government should not spend money to encourage its own citizens to partake in harmful activities.
That's what goverment ever do.
No.
If you want restrictions on gambling, on advertising it, on participating in it, on making money from it, you want to restrict individual liberty.
I want to restrict individual liberty, I have voted against gambling when it has come up for a vote in my state over and over.
You want to appear to be the type of person who wants to maintain individual liberty, but you in fact are not. You want to restrict individual liberty in the area of gambling.
I would also like to appear to be the type of person who wants to maintain individual liberty, and I will vote against gambling every single time it comes up.
No gambling.
I grant that, but I never claimed the contrary. I never suggested that banning advertising reduces ALL harm or preserves ALL individual liberty. I just believe an ad ban is a good compromise position.
I'm a former smoker. I would have been outraged had the government tried to ban cigarettes while I was addicted to nicotine. But there's a difference between allowing people to have their vices and allowing people to spend hundreds of millions in multi-media advertising campaigns convincing others to pick up a new one.
Equating them as exactly the same doesn't serve your argument justice even if you do have a point with respect to the OP's "have their cake and eat it too" rhetorical flourish.
No.
An organization's liberty to advertise is not individual liberty.
Let individuals gamble. Do not let organizations advertise gambling services. Organizational liberty is not individual liberty.
All of them also introduce rarities (arbitrary exclusiveness), hidden cards in a pack, and extreme gambling gamification.
The only non-gambling MtG packs are the preconstructed commander decks. All 100 cards are published. But the packs and boxes? Pure gambling, especially for the chase rare cards.
And before anyone asks, yes, my username is based after this $2 card. https://edhrec.com/commanders/nekusar-the-mindrazer
The thing is now people are marketing the pack opening. You have social media accounts of them pulling cards from packs and getting all hyped up about it. Again no one thought that was fun in the 90s, everyone hated that aspect of cards in the 90s but thats because the unboxing as an experience wasn't marketed by anyone at all. People just wanted cards they thought were personally cool in some way.
And likewise expansion of markets in the internet era means people start to have shared values of what is a valuable card based on market price vs just being interested in some certain cards out of your own interest.
Now as an adult, I see tweens with addictions to multiple things. Watch them beg to buy a Pokemon pack, open it, and lose interest. It's completely the dopamine expectation. And it takes years in recovery. But I think I was ignorant and unaware in the 90s of what other people were addicted to.
How old was everyone in the 1990s? Kids loved this kind of thing in the 2000s.
That's still the move. Unless you want to gamble.
Also consider that most Magic cards are also valuable only because of their collector status. The valuable ones are mint first editions and nobody is buying them to play them.
So who fuels this collectors market? Nostalgic 30-something that have now disposable income and want to buy things they wanted as children. Same as with videogames collectors and such. You don't need an original copy of Supermario to play it, but people still spend thousands to buy it.
Which is a shame, since the game itself is actually fun. Or it would be if you could buy the cards easily and cheaply.
Anyway, this is why I play MTG online - same with 40k, although there's no gambling there. Just too expensive to play either IRL even if I wanted to.
I think this depends on how you interact with your chosen game. To me, I play Yugioh as a hobby. If I'm "only" into the digital versions of the game, then it's no different to playing just about any other video game.
And even then, these live service TCGs (outside of unofficial simulators) can often have the same lootbox/pack gambling aspects as the real thing.
Personally that's not what I want. A good chunk of why I play paper is because of the physical community, in a space outside my home.
There is, until there isn't. MTG has been leaning drastically into tiered and ultra-premium products. Increasingly, it feels like Magic design and product is focused on extracting money from the whales at the price of hollowing out their playerbase.
It's difficult to draw a hard line between wholesome collecting and lootbox gambling, but it's hard not to notice that even the bastions of the collectible industry have been aggressively moving in the direction of the latter.
However, you can buy sealed product to both build your collection and get cards to trade. And the main reason for sealed to exist, ostensibly, is limited.
And a lot of people don't interact with the "gambling" aspect at all. I'm very deep into magic after 10 years, and I almost exclusively buy singles and do prereleases. I might buy like 10 random packs total in an entire year.
Like most new games these days. I play only old games or few special ones like Baldur’s Gate anymore.
I never understand why people "collect" these things
Their value is much less speculative and much more closely based on (blindbox price * distribution percentage of the rare variants) than most of the other items being dicussed here.
Coffeezilla: Exposing the Gambling Epidemic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45773049 - October 2025
There is no convergence. They have always been the same thing. The difference is that you can provide a venue where harm is reduced or one where harm is maximised.
https://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1990/9015/901507.PDF, specifically page 94.
Also, IMO there is a big difference between an open market that allows for price discovery and free trading versus placing bets against the same casino at predetermined prices.
See prostitution.
Off the top of my head:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-31/great-bri...
https://kyla.substack.com/p/gamblemerica-how-sports-betting-...
https://www.ft.com/content/e80df917-2af7-4a37-b9af-55d23f941...
https://www.dopaminemarkets.com/p/the-lottery-fication-of-ev...
https://www.investors.com/news/investing-gambling-robinhood-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-premier-league-footb...
https://www.ft.com/content/a39d0a2e-950c-4a54-b339-4784f7892...
Because this practice was made legal very recently in most places in the US and a concomitant advertising boom has saturated the media. Before the last few years, your average American couldn't bet on sports without visiting a casino sports book in person, or having a bookie (i.e., entering into a risky relationship with organized crime). TV sports coverage now openly refers to how you can use their analysis to make bets.
Also the stock market is NOT 0-sum. A buyer and seller can both "win".
If you look the whole lifetime of the stock and all owners and their transactions, it is close to zero-sum. Company can get more wealth by selling which is the exception and your argument. But for average retail-trader it is zero-sum game.
Gambling is the chance to have nothing at the end.
> if you need help making responsible choices, call…
Like, the only “responsible” choice is not to gamble online. What do they even think we’re supposed to take away from that line of the commercial?
Casinos and gambling institutions absolutely and purposely optimize to attract and capture more problem gamblers.
The evolution of digital slots is a great example of this. An average person could have a little fun with an old fashioned basic slot machine, but the modern ones are so aggressively optimized to trigger addiction and keep addicts going that if you aren't vulnerable, they are massively offputting.
But they don't care, they don't have any desire to serve "Normal" people, and trying to make gambling more fun for people who aren't vulnerable to gambling addiction isn't something they do.
Because nearly all profit comes from addicts.
I've thought of this often, seeing the state of mobile games. Not fun--they barely have strategy, little choice, and so much copy-cat gambling-machine mechanics.
I don't gamble at all in any form, but I still firmly disagree. Some people enjoy gambling in a way that never hurts them-- I've known countless friends and coworkers who talk about doing a bit of it in Vegas or what have you. You're saying every last one is a degenerate gambler somehow concealing it totally from me? They know they're not going net positive on the experience, usually lose some money, and get some entertainment.
There's a saying about this: abusers give vice a bad name. People should be free to gamble if they want to, and certain checks should be put in place for people who choose to gamble so much it is ruinous to themselves.
[1] https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/DMHAS/Publications/2023-CT-FIN... [2] https://www.umass.edu/seigma/media/583/download
A person can be generally responsible while still making decisions that are irresponsible. Gambling has a negative expected value, and so is generally considered to be irresponsible. Gamblers will often counter that they expect to lose their money and consider it to be a form of entertainment, but the whole of the entertainment is in believing that you might get lucky; this is indistinguishable from the motivation of a gambling addict. You don’t see these people taking out $500 in 1s and setting them on fire for fun, even though this is the aggregate outcome of habitual gambling.
Some might protest that all forms of entertainment are like this: You take the $500, take it to a movie theater, and 16 hours later your money is gone and you’ve seen 10 movies. So far as I know, the identification of casual gambling with vice dates back to the Victorian Period. I suspect (but cannot confirm) that the reason gambling was identified as a vice where other forms of comparatively frivolous entertainment were not is due to gambling’s (false) promise of providing money for nothing.
This is why I have a huge problem with the recent development of online gambling outlets that you can access via your smartphone. In the past you had to go somewhere to gamble, it was a physical act that provided a barrier to entry. Now? You don't even need to think about it, your bank account is already linked, just spend away!
Personally, I'd rather states loosen laws and allow physical casinos be built and properly regulated than be in the current situation we have with these poorly regulated online money-siphons.
Not at all. First, yes, people should be free to make their own choices. But that means making free choices. Just as we don’t allow advertising for cigarettes, we shouldn’t allow advertising for gambling.
Second, there’s a world of difference between “hey, let’s go have a crazy weekend in Vegas” and “I have a blackjack dealer live on my phone 24x7.”
What name do we give “the guy who says it’s fine to tear down Chestertons fence” ?
It was you who brought "degenerate" into it, as if throwing an insult or not made difference in facts.
Also, yes, gamblers hide their addiction. That is normal for gambler and you wont know it. They can be likable people and calling them "degenerate" just makes seeking help harder.
It feels like a bell curve topic, where the most naive people think you should just ban all vices and have a strictly better world, the middle of the road thinks it's all down to personal fortitude, and then people who know how the sausage is made realize the level of asymmetry that exists.
Weed isn't just weed anymore, it's fruity pebbles flavored.
Porn isn't just porn anymore, it tries to talk like a person and build a parasocial relationship.
Video games aren't just video games anymore, they start embedding gambling mechanics and spending 2 years designing the "End of Match" screen in a way that funnels you into the next game or lootbox pull.
You need to stop somewhere. Tech + profit motives create an asymmetric war for people's attention and money that results in new forms of old vices that are superficially the same, but realistically much much worse.
Gambling specifically online might just be giving tech companies too many knobs that are too easy to tune under the umbrella of engagement and retention.
It's a net negative for society but we can't simply get rid of it because of the side effect of doing so, particularly since it's so easy to brew alcohol.
(More apt comparison is obviously alcohol commercials saying “please drink responsibly”)
By the 2040 US presidential election, anti-gambling legislation will be a bigger party platform issue than abortion is for one of the two major US political parties.
We are ruining a generation of men with this, just as we did with alcohol in the era before prohibition. A wiser and more sensible approach is desperately needed today, but will not come for another 15 years until the damage is inescapable to see.
Also, the people loosing money on crypto, MtG and games with gambling mechanics tend to be more of men. It is kind of a gendered issue.
It's a bit different today in particular though as we're in equinox season (when many major sports leagues play on the same day). So your local college football team is playing today, the world series game 7 is today, and there are NBA and NHL on today, and NFL is tomorrow.
Polymarket uses open orderbooks where you match against someone else who wants the other side of the trade just like the stock market. Prices are set by the market, as they should be.
Nobody should be day trading unless it's their job. Yes, I have seen many guys get sucked into it.
Also you are ignoring platforms like Novig which are like the polymarket for sports betting.
Susquehanna. Jane Street. Two Sigma.
It's not some rando two towns over. The PMs get paid to front run access to these market makers, who crush the retail bettor, er, predictor.
Am I going crazy, or was it just... disappeared from there??
What it has a lot less of is random public policy influencers writing polemics about it. There's some, sure, and that's exactly where RFK and the MAHA coalition come from. But professionals don't treat MAHA and their blogs as coda. So why do we do the same for anything related to money?
(giving extreme benefit of the doubt, here)
With Sport Betting, throwing advertisements and having bets talked about by sports analysts during the game is starting to be seen as bad thing because it's seen as really bad habit, like smoking and maybe society should attempt to regulate it better.
2. Fear is the emotion that's easiest to trigger because before modernity, life was indeed quite dangerous. You can make shitload of money by making people feel scared.
3. It is true that for many people, the society got worse, and they want to know why.
I'd hate to get all true scotsman but a true leftist would never preach for prohibition as a solution for vice.
These are mostly men, and a very specific type of men. You can try to curtail their access to gambling but we're missing the underlying problem.
Because when it comes to the underlying psychological causes of homelessness and drug addiction and school shootings and violent extremism my impression is we don’t really do much.
I am not sure what you are saying with homelessness...it isn't some massive baffling issue, someone who doesn't have a house, needs a house so build a house? School shootings...I don't understand how anyone can believe this is normal?
The US has fairly obvious social problems, these essentially inhibit the functional resolution of most of these problems you list. However, gambling is not like this, the solution to problem gambling is (obviously) regulating gambling so that it is possible for the government to control people's behaviour. Simple.
Homelessness? Build houses. Drug addiction? Get people clean, harsh sentences for dealing. School shootings? No guns. Violent extremism? Jail. These aren't real problems. Most of the world does not have issues with this stuff (I will accept through drug usage in the US appears to be so ingrained in culture, that it would never be possible for anyone to do anything to fix it...the solutions are known however). It is only over the last ten years or so where government has appeared totally unable to do anything because of paralyzing social discord.
A school shooting happens. You don't want to ban guns. So you say "switzerland doesn't have this problem, we need to address the mental health issues that are driving these young men to kill" as a distraction. Nobody's got a workable plan to do that, so you do nothing - which is what you wanted to begin with.
There are lots of rough sleepers. You don't want to build more houses. So you say "many homeless people are estranged from their support network by mental health issues and addiction, we need to address this underlying cause" as a distraction. Nobody's got a workable plan to do that, so you do nothing.
> Build houses.
That doesn't solve homelessness, as we build many houses in America but they aren't being filled with the homeless. You need to apply social services in a complex systematic approach to provide housing that people can afford sustainably, and rehabilitate and integrate people into society. You might think that is a bit of a bad faith "gotcha" like, of course you have to make the housing free and ensure homeless people know it's available. But it's not a small detail to elide, even in context, and doing so is exactly why your thinking is off-base. You haven't even begun to unpack it properly, putting aside the falsehoods. Think about it, what do you do if someone doesn't want to accept the housing for complex reasons like pride or embarrassment? What if it's some crust punk kid riding suicide as a rite of passage? You have to deal with a lot of that! You can't just ignore it!
> Get people clean, harsh sentences for dealing.
Punitive measures have proven to be a complete and total failure globally. Even in Asia, where penalties on all sides of the drug trade are high, drug usage is very easy to find and rising. I say this as someone connected to Asia and with a fair amount of "street smarts" that some seem to lack. Japan and Korea don't even try to hide it anymore. Chinese cities are kept clean through a complex system of travel controls and consistent policing to sweep things under the rug. It's easy to score if you pass as Chinese outside of the tier 1 and 2 cities though. Even Saudi Arabia is flooded with black market drugs if you know where to look. Punitive measures empirically do not work.
> Violent extremism? Jail
Where is that not the case? Like what are you talking about? Do you know how common attempted domestic terrorism was against the US power grid and cell towers in 2020/2021? No, you don't. Almost nobody does, and certainly nobody has an exact number. That's because it was kept very quiet and the thousands of incidents were suppressed from the media cycle while the people involved were quietly thrown into the maximum security incarceration hole never to be seen again.
The person you're replying to is right. These issues are solved, and it means looking at why people want to do any of this to begin with and addressing that. You cut it off at the behavioral source. Think of it like this, do you check every pointer before you dereference it? No. You avoid bad pointer dereferences primarily through proper structure of your code.
You almost tap into this with being cognizant of the fact that it's not universal. It depends greatly on the country and culture. Because some countries and cultures have done a much better job at building worthwhile, healthy societies than others.
Do you enable the majority who can manage risk, knowing some will be destroyed by it or deny it to everyone to protect the minority who can’t?
In a couple decades, they'll be a massive drag on society and could even collapse countries. France is kind of a good example of how that future will look like.
You should address that too, but gambling is frankly a parasitic business meant to exploit such people, and we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good by avoiding the re-abolishment of such a pernicious industry.
Problem for you maybe. A life lived in fear is not worth living at all
If you really really want to gamble then go, travel to Nevada and do it.
The problem is sticking their filthy ads and purchased propagandists into the faces of vulnerable people and society at large.
Preying on victims over the phone, soc. media ads, bought manipulators so called influencers with no morale.
What is it about gambling that people find bad while other advertising for harmful stuff gets a free pass?
It might be something we should treat more like smoking.
- Require a disclosure of the EV of each bet as the user is placing it. E.g.: Expected loss $5.
- Ad targeting restrictions.
No they won't, because moving real money to and from these shady offshore websites is a nightmare, and without enforcement there will be too much fraud in the system for the vast majority of regular people to bother.
Gambling is so prevalent today because 1) there is incessant advertising, including being overlaid on the game you are watching and 2) it is convenient, taking like 3 clicks and under a minute to go from scratch to placing bets. You can even use Apple Pay. Take away either of these and participation rates will plummet.
You don't even need to speculate, just look at the numbers. There were countless illegal and gray market gambling options available a decade ago, both online and in-person. How many people were participating back then? I personally didn't know anyone who bet on games outside of maybe the occasional trip to Vegas, and that too was just for the novelty of it. Today >50% of adults in the US are regularly betting online, and the number is growing every year.
It’s similar to weed legalization 10 years ago. Yes, it’s now much less likely that your weed will be spiked with meth or you will be robbed by your dealer, but also like 1000% more of the population smokes weed now and it has some bad social side effects that people don’t like to think about.
I think in both cases, as with prohibition, making something commonplace illegal again tends to make people do crazy things if they’re addicted, and I’d bet gambling is no different
The rise of gambling in the US does indicate an economic hopelessness that mirrors Argentina, but it’s not quite to the same level yet.
If I give out free dope, I'll get a lot of people hooked. If I give out free sports betting, but you get nothing, then nobody is hooked.
Source 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...
None of these companies should be worth a billion dollars.
My big fear is these companies are all getting rich which means they'll be able to buy political influence.
I'm pretty tolerant of a lot of vices. I also don't really have a problem with low levels of gambling. But the way these companies are setup is just sick. It's abusive the the public and erosive to society in general.
Surely, like murder, and other negative outcome behaviors, we can reduce the occurrences, right?
But variance, not expectation, is where casinos get their edge. The “Gambler’s ruin”[0] demonstrates that even in a fair game the Casino will win due to their effectively infinite bankroll compared to the player.
You can also simulate this yourself in code: have multiple players with small bankrolls play a game with positive EV but very high variance. You’ll find that the majority of players still lose all their money to the casino.
You can also see this intuitively: Imagine a game with a 1 in a million chance to win 2 million dollars, but each player only has a $10 bankroll. You can easily see that a thousand people could play this game and the house would still come out ahead despite the EV being very much in the players favor.
The demand will always be there but there should be strong incentives to not incentivize use (e.g., the Purdue Pharma debacle). We're better served by having these markets addressed by legit players rather then criminal cartels.
I'm not sure what the best solution is, but unfettered promotion to consume is not the way.
You can block it at payment rails. The reasonable amount of avoidance of controls around gambling laws is not zero [1]. You're making it hard for all but the most determined, who are free to lose it all.
[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... (Control-F "This extends beyond payments") Broadly speaking, we are not "solving" gambling with these ideas; we are, as a society and sociopolitical economic system, pulling levers to arrive at the intersection of harm reduction and rights impairment. Some gambling, but only so much, for most but not all.
(work in finance, risk management, fintech/payments, etc)
Maybe a better law: check id, you are not allowed to take from any gambler more than 10 bets a year and no bet can be over 1k.
For big gamblers, we can have "qualified gamblers" rules like we do for qualified investors.
Funny how we don't let average people invest in some stuff but we let them gamble.
For offshore gambling pursue them aggressively if they serve US clients.
This is actually a take I haven't seen elsewhere. Yes, we do protect investors at least marginally better (lots of people still get fleeced with little recourse, unfortunately) but conceptually, this is a very interesting idea.
The fact that gambling exists on a loophole of being "for entertainment purposes only"[0] isn't a good enough distinction to me.
[0]: This is a brief one sentence summary of it. There's actually a bit of nuance involved depending on a number of factors, but essentially the core presume rests on some version of this.
I would hope that I don't need to explain why this isn't a good idea. But the one you may not have thought of: gambling companies love this because small companies are unable to audit, margins in the sector collapsed when activity moved online, that has stopped AND they are able to target customers who they don't want to deal with, before these rules it was difficult to identify customers who would take their money, now they have your passport, your address, your bank statements, they know where your money comes from (professional gamblers can still use beards but in the UK, students used to be very popular beards...that has stopped, regulators have also brought in rules to prevent beards being used as part of the changes above...the "neoliberal" US doesn't have rules anywhere close to this, it is complete madness).
Just fucking ban it.
Decriminalize low value bets between average people maybe but there's zero reason we need a gambling industry.
It is impossible for this industry to behave. Just kill it.
Your average Fent dealer isn't this predatory FFS
You realise that people waste their money on things that are significantly less understandable than gambling. Do you see someone driving a Ferrari and seethe with rage because Ferrari doesn't run a "qualified driver" program?
Either way, Ferrari is selling cars. Not dreams of riches.
Addictions are a symptom of having an excessive amount of free time, floating money and lack of fear of reprisal from family and society and lack of basic wisdom.
Excessive prosperity breaks social rythm. It removes dependencies and relations across individuals. It's like a tree turned into chips, with freedom for every chip. As individuals, you won (materialistic luxury etc), but as a family, community or country, you fail.
Those who have no prosperity are often the ones gambling, not the rich. When SS checks come in, our local casino fills with chain smoking seniors pulling levers on the slot with all their retirement security. It’s a sad addiction.
Theres too many moving parts in your very short paragraph, to actual engage with without any substantial engagement being minced into woodchips, I fear.
Theres many things that have happened since the 40s, just to name ONE thing that has resulted in this - we have much better psychological technology than we did ever before. Skinnerian conditioning, reward schedules, their results - we never had that.
MS Excel alone would mean we better ways for the statistically inclined to zero in on more attractive addictions, just through better data analysis.
Just consider how common place and obvious A/B testing is. How do you think humanity will fare on average, against industrial strength siren songs?
The accumulated social rot is not compensated by Excel sheets or any gadget toys, you call as tech.
Sure, or any of the other million reasons people get addicted, like despair, or other healthier activities being too expensive. Super weird take.
Professional (and collegiate) athletics has always been corrupt - now it’s just more visible.
The only thing needing abolishing is the advertising of gambling.
I certainly feel that people should be able to do it if they really want to, but making it super accessible and highly advertised seems like a bad idea.
Neither accessibility or advertising impacts rates of addiction. It is a real addiction. Does a lack of advertising stop heroin use? Behave.
Your definition of coercive is too permissive, so it ends up being more of an ideological stance, but its a saturday, so its a fun argument to work through.
If something is coercive, its inherently aiming to generate an unfair transaction. That means we need to spend a ton of effort on forums where such unfair transacations can be reversed, and punitive measures applied.
Otherwise we are always going to fail as a society, simply because coercive technqiues will be the default. Any new business, discovery, or product which provides a net benefit without defending itself from predatory practices will be torpedoed. resulting in a moribund economy and culture.
Having gone through what you have, I suspect you quietly prefer people learning from your example, over discovering the same lessons by following in your foot steps.
The UK went through almost everything the US is going through right now some years ago, where problem gambling led to suicides and people struggling to pay bills. Multiple measures have been taken that seem to have directly helped that situation: VIP programs have been scrapped; advertising is being limited; and, you may have to prove you can afford to bet the levels you're betting at to an operator, which is an incredibly unpopular move (who wants to send their pay slips to their bookie?), but does seem to have quelled things a little.
However there is more to do, and there is something you can do right now if you are losing money and want to reduce the impact these products have on you.
Stop playing casino and video slot games. Focus on sports only.
The myth is that the problem gamblers are losing their money on 2nd Division Nigerian netball games in the middle of the night. Yes, there are some people who are looking for sports action all the time, but that's not the biggest source of problems.
With sports, you have a little time to think. I recommend not playing in-play unless you have automated that solution to find EV and its executing for you (I know people who make money doing this on Betfair in the UK). Bet before game only, and you will have a built-in "cool off" period.
You don't get that with casino games or video slots. Its relentless, and you can lose thousands an hour before you even realise what is happening.
And then, there's EV. Expected Value. Sometimes (actually, kinda often), the odds a bookmaker puts up are a bit wrong.
Not every price, it might be a prop bet on a particular player, and they're putting a price up on a Monday for a Saturday game, and you have a spreadsheet that dings something and tells you what the kelly stake should be and you put 1% of your bankroll on it, and then you might sell it back on Saturday morning when the market has got right or you let it ride (and there's maths to tell you when to do that and when not), and you ride some variance but make money.
That's not possible on casino or video slot games. They just bleed you. There is no EV. If you win, you got lucky (the scientific name for this is "experienced positive variance"), and you should run away quickly before you lose it back. But the sure way to win on those games is the same as in Wargames: don't play at all.
I'm biased, I realise that, but I would love to see the outlawing of casino and slot games on mobile.
I would also like to see more education in schools around probability and statistics (the founder of SIG, a storied institution who is now a market maker on Kalshi, the prediction market platform), argues that the fascination with calculus in schools might have helped during the space race, but today we need people to really understand Bayes theorem more than anything else. I agree.
If you want to start your own education in how to bet a little smarter and lose a little less, I can recommend The Logic of Sports Betting [0] and its sequel Interception [1]. I also like Dan Abrams' book [2], that talks about expected growth, not just exepcted value.
These are not get rich quick schemes, but it will give you an idea of what goes on in the minds of people who try and take this all very seriously. You'll still need to think about modelling and how to get your own prices to compare with those you're being offered, but if you're not prepared to do that work, what is it you're actually doing?
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Sports-Betting-Ed-Miller/dp/109...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Interception-Secrets-Modern-Sports-Be...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/But-How-Much-Did-Lose-ebook/dp/B0DRZ2...
Some bookmakers are marketing companies that will kill unprofitable accounts, but not all of them. It does not take a lot of work and research to work out who is who if you want to take this seriously, or how to make sure your account stays under the radar long enough, or even how to get around those mechanisms - some of those techniques may ultimately be considered fraud, however.
And if you don't want to take it seriously, what are you doing throwing huge wads of cash at it?
Apologists for that practice claimed there was no harm in it, but now we see the harm - a generation of young men trained on those that is now older and ruining their financial future on sports betting.
This is exactly what it felt like to work in crypto.
Don’t expect anything to change anytime soon
Which is a fun novel conflict of interest because he’s also ultimately the executive in charge of making sure national elections are properly conducted.
Since this is the direction America is going, why not have judges take bets on the outcome of trials? Would be a nice income stream for them, and it would save taxpayer money when judges don’t need to be paid anymore.
Gambling , especially in person gambling such as poker is basically a toned down version of combat sports where you are socially allowed to take something from somebody else because the other person accepted the conditions by sitting at the table or entering the casino.
Much like a boxer accepts the risk when they enter the ring.
The same thing happens on your beloved stock market, you just don't see it.
No way. It's almost like these are addictive products being engineered to be as addictive as possible and deliberately punch people's brains in such a way to make them stay. That's so weird.
The exact same argument could be used to make social media illegal.
No-one can use social media because some people in our society can't control themselves. Socialise the losses.
Limiting social media to be only used for communication, and not algorithms is a good thing.
To label such activity as a tax on the poor is nothing more than a euphemism. I understand what is being said by the verbiage "tax" in this context. Although no real tax is voluntary.
Labeling this as an issue that disproportionately affects poor is misleading. This is an issue for a few select individuals who make poor decisions. The correlation for poor decisions and lower disposable income is higher than the contrary.
Wealthy by all means have the ability to wager more than they can afford. Often times, they wager significantly higher than average income individuals; however, they stay within their means
- fanduel owns networks. So what?
- gambling taxes = corporate taxes in MD. This is misleading as state level corporate are effectively $0
- 20% of Americans have placed a bet. So?
I have never done sports gambling myself but this article fails to convince that it’s a problem
Turns out the darkest timeline is also the dumbest.
https://www.nme.com/news/back-to-the-future-writer-reveals-b...
1. Gambling is a real addiction. It is quite strange that someone using the term "Addiction Markets" fails to understand this. People who are gambling addicts were gambling before it was legal, they were just getting their legs broken in a way that was non-visible to you.
2. If you ban gambling, the ability of people to gamble online is not reduced in any way. None. The US offshore market was the biggest sports gambling market in the world before it was legalised. Not even close.
3. I would take a close look at how offshore gambling operators work before casting aspersions about onshore. Onshore, providers are working with regulators to an extremely significant degree. Offshore, sites will advertise that you can gamble on their site if you are on an onshore ban list. If onshore providers are so terrible, why is this the case?
4. The attempt to say that lotteries are addictive is just nonsense. Generally, there is a very poor understanding of what gambling addiction is (again, point 1). Certain games are designed to appeal to gambling addicts (again, the most prevalent ground for these was...the US...before online gambling was legal, biggest market by far, almost all the large companies making these games come from the US), those games are harmful. Lottery, sports gambling, raffles, DFS, etc. lack all of these properties. In particular, providers will often use virtual events (virtual horse-racing) to try to mimic the properties of more addictive products (with relatively little success)...because the original thing is not as appealing to addicts.
5. It is correct that the UK has "stake limits" (not quite sure what the author thinks this...all regulated US providers also have these, some states also have deposit acks...which would be beyond the UK standard, I would say many US states are ahead of the UK) but this is only on certain kinds of machines. The author spills a huge amount of words, talks about Trump, talks about the 1980s...but doesn't seem to talk about these machines, which are more prevalent in the US, at all. The author doesn't say anything about the issues in the UK being the same. VIP programs in the UK aren't regulated in any way different to the US (providers have no market lists). There is one important difference: in the UK, the government has given gambling providers that powers to perform extensive background checks, they take your income, an audit of your assets and then decide whether you can use their product...people opposed to gambling never mention this. How does that fit with neoliberal? A company being given the same powers as regulators?
6. There is an issue with corruption in the US. There is no coincidence that the law on online gambling changed within a few months of one of the largest donors blocking this. Both sides benefitted from this as the largest Democrat donor in those years was the Las Vegas casino workers union. Again, because this corruption meant that some kinds of gambling didn't happen...no mention. This was, we now know, hundreds of billions in value generated by paying politicians hundreds of millions a year...no mention.
7. The author appears to be unaware that DFS existed after UIGEA, not "laughable"...just a basic understanding of the sequence of events.
8. Gambling is not inherently addictive. Many things that are legal in the US are not only inherently addictive, but are inherently harmful. Liberals care about you losing your money when you buy a $5 scratch-off, they don't care about you losing your mind with mind-bending psychoactive substances.
> Gambling is not inherently addictive.
What do you reckon makes gambling go from not inherently addictive to a real addiction?
It's hard to take anything you say seriously if you insist on being this disingenuous. You could just as easily say "Liberals care about people being financially ruined and driven into homelessness, but they don't care about you sharing a doobie on the weekend with your bros."
I don't get it. Somehow, them being underage makes it better and not worse??