5 ms·

Is it bad for society? It's certainly bad for individuals, and by extension their families. I guess if it scales up such that a serious chunk of society is affe

Is it bad for society? It's certainly bad for individuals, and by extension their families. I guess if it scales up such that a serious chunk of society is affected, then yes its bad for society. Let's start with the obvious- in all forms of gambling the gamblers make a net loss. The games are hosted by very sophisticated companies, that have better mathematicians, and make money. $x is pumped into the system by the punters, $y is extracted, $z is returned. The 'house' is the only winner. All those TV ads you see? Funded by losers. Is it light entertainment? Similar to the cost of a ticket to the game? For some sure. But we understand the chemistry of gambling- it's addictive and compulsive. If we agree it's generally bad, then what? Lots of things are known to be bad, but are still allowed (smoking and drinking spring to mind, nevermind sugar.) It could be banned. Would that stop it? Probably not. Perhaps ban advertising? Perhaps tax gambling companies way higher (like we do with booze and smokes.) Perhaps treat it as a serious issue? All of which is unlikely in the US. Business rules, and sports gambling us really good business.

creato 1y ago
> Let's start with the obvious- in all forms of gambling the gamblers make a net loss. The games are hosted by very sophisticated companies, that have better mathematicians, and make money. It's not impossible to beat them consistently, but if you do, they'll limit how much you can bet or just ban you.
- katbyte 1y ago
  Seems like an easy solution is just to ban them from banning winners. Regulate them
  - skippyboxedhero 1y ago
    There is no reason why they have to provide a fair market to all users. The purpose of the product is entertainment, not financial risk. There are providers who specialise in providing action to sharps which then sets the prices that retail-facing customers use. If you want to make money, just bet with them. But limiting users is a way to provide a sustainable product. Again, it is an entertainment product, it is not a financial investment. Also, the quoted text is wrong...gambling companies do not employ lots of mathematicians, I am not sure why people think this...I am not even 100% sure why people think mathematicians are useful, most of the stats used are very basic. But retail providers don't, the prices you see for the biggest lines are provided by third parties, when you make a bet retail providers have no idea what price is being offered to you at that time. The only exception is parlays which are often priced in-house, these lines are very beatable but, again, retail providers limit because the purpose of the product is entertainment. Providers that do business with syndicates do not have lines on parlays because they are so beatable. The protection comes from all users being limited in the amount they can bet on parlays. A side note is that even in financial markets which are completely open, market makers avoid informed flow. If there was no uninformed flow, there would be no market makers. There has to be an ecosystem. Retail providers exist to buy advertising to win retail users every weekend, to do that they have to run their business in a certain way. There can't be a situation where they just lose money non-stop to fund someone else's business.
tokioyoyo 1y ago
> It could be banned. Would that stop it? Probably not. Was not that big of a thing 15 years ago. The goal of a ban is not to reduce the consumption to 0, but try to lower it a significant amount. Although, since people are generally aware of it and participated in it, it might not be that easy to go back to beforetimes.
- Fade_Dance 1y ago
  It doesn't have to be a prohibition either. Advertising could be banned. Branding could be controlled so it isn't appealing (Provider 1, Provider 2, etc). Parlay bets and "innovations" (which burn customer money 10 times faster) could be restricted. The "concierge" service that preys on the big spending addicts could be regulated/erased. That's the sort of ban that actually works for society, because it is strongly focused on disincentivizing harmful behavior, while shutting out the black market.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    The other regulation would be acredited gambler thresholds, that limits how much an individual can bet, based on some formula that accounts for a person's income and net worth. You're just not allowed to gamble more than a third of what you legally earned last paycheck or whatever.
  - toast0 1y ago
    > Advertising could be banned. I always liked how the offshore casinos would setup a play money casino on their name.net and advertise that on the poker shows. Of course, I imagine a lot of people would put in .com instead and accidentally end up on the real money casino. Whoops.
- ta1243 1y ago
  Genies are tricky to get back in the bottle - especially when you can just as easily go to a company based in the Caymen Islands or wherever and spend that way. Phones allow you to gamble from anywhere on anything. You could ban advertising it during sports broadcasts, which would probably reduce things a fair bit, but that's likely to impact the "casual" gambler who I don't do sports, but occasionally I'm in a pub and they are on. I've seen in the UK over the years how pervasive it is now compared to a generation ago. The advertising companies paint this picture of it not only being normal, but also being the only way to enjoy a game. I'm fairly sure that my parents and grandparents who were big into football enjoyed games quite happily in the past. In the 90s the typical sports gambling in the UK was old men putting the price of a pint on the pools or in a fruit machine, where you guessed which team would win. The winning limit on the fruit machines was about 5 pints worth, and the pools was a confusing weekly maths challenge while listening to results such as "Forfar Four, East Fife Five" The explosion of "fixed odds betting" machines which dispensed with the social aspect of going to a pub and spending £5 over lunch in favour of extracting £50 in 5 minutes and moving on, combined with general high street abandonment led to a terrible blight on uk town centres. Online gambling meant you no longer had to go into a seedy shop to hand in a betting slip for the 3:40 at doncaster, then wait for an hour or so in the pub next door to watch it with acquaintances, but instead you could do it all from your own home. Gambling has become industrialised in the last generation, emphasising the cash extraction and reducing the pleasure it brought. It's no longer £3 for an hour of interest, it's become about extracting as much money as possible (and thus the adverts are all about winning big bucks because you as a sports nerd know far more about which player will score first than the betting companies do)
Terr_ 1y ago
I'm imagining mandatory disclosures like on cigarette packs, except it's some distribution chart or percentile figure for bankruptcy.
viccis 1y ago
>It could be banned. Would that stop it? Probably not. Absolutely asinine statement. Yeah no shit it's not going to deter the most degenerate of gamblers of seeking out a place to make bets. Will it stop apps being advertised on TV and the app stores from grooming new people into it? Yes. Will it stop people mildly curious from betting on sports? Yes. If "it" in "stop it" is "all sports betting" then no, obviously. If "it" is "sports betting in normal society" then yep, it will stop it. Anyone obfuscating this simple fact wants to make money off of more human misery, remember that. Remind me of how cigarette usage has gone in nations that ban advertisement of it.
- skippyboxedhero 1y ago
  The point OP is making is almost completely unrelated to addiction. If someone is a gambling addict, they are going to do it. One of the issues with gambling addicts in the US before legalization is that they would use illegal bookmakers, and then get their legs broken. Legalizing is the only way to implement a harm prevention strategy because states regulators can control providers (for example, all states in the US have exclusion lists that they maintain and which providers have to implement, regulators have direct control over operations). In addition, there is also a lot of evidence that if you regulate ineffectively, you will also cause harm. Hong Kong is a classic example where some forms of gambling are legalized to raise revenue (iirc, very effective, over 10% of total tax revenue) but other forms are banned in order to maximise revenue...addicts are the only users of underground services. Sweden have a state-run gambling operator, that operator provides a bad service (unsurprisingly), again addicts are driven to underground services. For some reason the general public perceives gambling as both inherently addictive and something that can only be triggered by gambling being legal. Neither of these things are true. Substances are inherently addictive, gambling is not, the proportion of gamblers that are addicted is usually around 1%...of gamblers, not the total population. And it isn't triggered by gambling being legal, it is a real addiction so is present regardless.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > If someone is a gambling addict, they are going to do it Gambling marketing, and the gambling industry, facilitate the production of gambling addicts.
watwut 1y ago
> It's certainly bad for individuals, and by extension their families. When gambler makes debt, then the partner gets half the debt in divorce. And they have to pay it. It is not bad for families just "by extension". It is directly harming the family members even after the divorce.
- DiggyJohnson 1y ago
  Personal gambling debt is individual unless credited to a joint account no?
  - watwut 1y ago
    In marriage, stuff you acquire during marriage is "common" no matter which accout you used. The same applies to debt. (Pre existing assets and debts are purely yours). The common stuff then splits half half unless there was prenup or something.
    - howard941 1y ago
      This very much varies state-by-state (ignoring prenups and emergency med treatment as edge cases). In my marriage and state (FL) debts incurred by me remain my own. Wifey owes none of it. Compare with states that have community property or purchases made as tenants by the entirety.
  - toast0 1y ago
    I live in a community property state, all of my accounts are owned by the marriage regardless of how they're titled. I would imagine legal debts are similar. There's some exceptions and I suppose gambling debt could be one, but I would expect the default to be that the debt holder could collect from assets held by either spouse.
    - bruce511 1y ago
      This will vary greatly from one jurisdiction to another. It can also depend on the specific kind of marriage. Yes, some marriages are "community of property", some are not. Even in community of property though some debts may be on the individual not the couple. So one cannot really talk in generalities regarding this.
pjc50 1y ago
Gambling used to be so illegal in the US that it used its global Internet jurisdiction to shut down poker companies located outside the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
- bongodongobob 1y ago
  And yet every bar I go to, as far back as I can remember, has slot machines and somehow that doesn't count? Even gas stations. Never understood this.
  - mpalmer 1y ago
    Scale.
  - nickthegreek 1y ago
    That is very much state by state in the usa. My state never had slots in gas stations or bars.
  - GenerWork 1y ago
    This sounds like Nevada. I remember arriving in the Reno airport for the first time and being astounded that there were so many slot machines around. Even CVS had slot machines!
    - FergusArgyll 1y ago
      It's wild, first thing you encounter when you come off the plane is just rows and rows of slot machines. Jarring
    - bongodongobob 1y ago
      Nope, Midwest.
  - mikestew 1y ago
    Once you left Nevada, I doubt you saw the same thing. If I want to see a slot machine in Washington, I have to go to a casino on a native reservation.
RataNova 1y ago
I do think advertising is the lowest-hanging fruit here. There's no good reason we should be letting sportsbooks run ads during games that are watched by kids
- slumberlust 1y ago
  Kids are the majority of people I know who bet a lot. Mostly teenagers on the ski lifts talking about parlays and long shots.
  - throwaway2037 1y ago
    > Kids are the majority of people I know who bet a lot. Mostly teenagers on the ski lifts talking about parlays and long shots. Woah. What country? I cannot imagine this is happening in Sweden, France, Italy, Austria or Switzerland.
inerte 1y ago
> The games are hosted by very sophisticated companies, that have better mathematicians, and make money. Oh, it's worse than that. In sports betting at least, if the gambler consistently makes money, the companies will ban or limit their gains. It's a scam.
idopmstuff 1y ago
> Let's start with the obvious- in all forms of gambling the gamblers make a net loss. The games are hosted by very sophisticated companies, that have better mathematicians, and make money. > $x is pumped into the system by the punters, $y is extracted, $z is returned. The 'house' is the only winner. This is incorrect, specifically with regard to sports betting. Sports betting and poker are both winnable games. Most people don't win in the long run, but unlike in table games (Blackjack, etc.) there are absolutely winners that are not the house. To be clear, that doesn't mean they're good or should be allowed. I used to be a poker player and enjoy putting some bets on football now, but I've come around to the general idea that sports betting in particular is a net negative for society. Still, if you're going to make an argument against it, it's always going to be a better argument if it isn't built on a basis that's just factually untrue.
- bruce511 1y ago
  Net loss means that if you add all the players together, the losses exceed the winnings. Yes some individuals win (at least occasionally.) But as a group it's always a net loss (because the house takes a cut.)
  - idopmstuff 1y ago
    The statement "in all forms of gambling the gamblers make a net loss" is ambiguous as to whether it's the gamblers as a whole or each of the gamblers making a net loss, and while I grant that it reads more like the way you're describing, the later context pushes the intended meaning in the other direction. He says "The 'house' is the only winner," which is as a point of fact untrue - there are also individual gamblers who are winners. Saying this implies he thinks that each of the gamblers is a net loser.
monkeyelite 1y ago
> Perhaps ban advertising Yes. Ban the phone apps and had the ads. Advertising works people, that’s why they pay for it!
borroka 1y ago
Society's desire for regulation of behavior ebbs and flows. Not limited to the US: prostitution was legal and then it was not and now there is a laissez-faire of some kind in some places, in others there are brothels, in others you cannot, strictly speaking, but in practice it is whatever; The consumption of alcohol was initially allowed, then forbidden, and later allowed again. Nowadays, some "thought leaders" are again somewhat pushing, if not for regulation, for public condemnation; Abortion, same-sex sexual relationships, gambling, drugs, they all follow a similar pattern of regulation-liberalization-regulation- (random order), answering to "society" or some prominent voices within or the ever fleeting vibes of the times. In other words, it does not make, strictly speaking, sense that certain behaviors are regulated or prohibited, and others are not.

creato 1y ago

katbyte 1y ago
Seems like an easy solution is just to ban them from banning winners. Regulate them
- skippyboxedhero 1y ago
  There is no reason why they have to provide a fair market to all users. The purpose of the product is entertainment, not financial risk. There are providers who specialise in providing action to sharps which then sets the prices that retail-facing customers use. If you want to make money, just bet with them. But limiting users is a way to provide a sustainable product. Again, it is an entertainment product, it is not a financial investment. Also, the quoted text is wrong...gambling companies do not employ lots of mathematicians, I am not sure why people think this...I am not even 100% sure why people think mathematicians are useful, most of the stats used are very basic. But retail providers don't, the prices you see for the biggest lines are provided by third parties, when you make a bet retail providers have no idea what price is being offered to you at that time. The only exception is parlays which are often priced in-house, these lines are very beatable but, again, retail providers limit because the purpose of the product is entertainment. Providers that do business with syndicates do not have lines on parlays because they are so beatable. The protection comes from all users being limited in the amount they can bet on parlays. A side note is that even in financial markets which are completely open, market makers avoid informed flow. If there was no uninformed flow, there would be no market makers. There has to be an ecosystem. Retail providers exist to buy advertising to win retail users every weekend, to do that they have to run their business in a certain way. There can't be a situation where they just lose money non-stop to fund someone else's business.

tokioyoyo 1y ago

> It could be banned. Would that stop it? Probably not. Was not that big of a thing 15 years ago. The goal of a ban is not to reduce the consumption to 0, but try to lower it a significant amount. Although, since people are generally aware of it and participated in it, it might not be that easy to go back to beforetimes.

Fade_Dance 1y ago
It doesn't have to be a prohibition either. Advertising could be banned. Branding could be controlled so it isn't appealing (Provider 1, Provider 2, etc). Parlay bets and "innovations" (which burn customer money 10 times faster) could be restricted. The "concierge" service that preys on the big spending addicts could be regulated/erased. That's the sort of ban that actually works for society, because it is strongly focused on disincentivizing harmful behavior, while shutting out the black market.
- fragmede 1y ago
  The other regulation would be acredited gambler thresholds, that limits how much an individual can bet, based on some formula that accounts for a person's income and net worth. You're just not allowed to gamble more than a third of what you legally earned last paycheck or whatever.
- toast0 1y ago
  > Advertising could be banned. I always liked how the offshore casinos would setup a play money casino on their name.net and advertise that on the poker shows. Of course, I imagine a lot of people would put in .com instead and accidentally end up on the real money casino. Whoops.
ta1243 1y ago
Genies are tricky to get back in the bottle - especially when you can just as easily go to a company based in the Caymen Islands or wherever and spend that way. Phones allow you to gamble from anywhere on anything. You could ban advertising it during sports broadcasts, which would probably reduce things a fair bit, but that's likely to impact the "casual" gambler who I don't do sports, but occasionally I'm in a pub and they are on. I've seen in the UK over the years how pervasive it is now compared to a generation ago. The advertising companies paint this picture of it not only being normal, but also being the only way to enjoy a game. I'm fairly sure that my parents and grandparents who were big into football enjoyed games quite happily in the past. In the 90s the typical sports gambling in the UK was old men putting the price of a pint on the pools or in a fruit machine, where you guessed which team would win. The winning limit on the fruit machines was about 5 pints worth, and the pools was a confusing weekly maths challenge while listening to results such as "Forfar Four, East Fife Five" The explosion of "fixed odds betting" machines which dispensed with the social aspect of going to a pub and spending £5 over lunch in favour of extracting £50 in 5 minutes and moving on, combined with general high street abandonment led to a terrible blight on uk town centres. Online gambling meant you no longer had to go into a seedy shop to hand in a betting slip for the 3:40 at doncaster, then wait for an hour or so in the pub next door to watch it with acquaintances, but instead you could do it all from your own home. Gambling has become industrialised in the last generation, emphasising the cash extraction and reducing the pleasure it brought. It's no longer £3 for an hour of interest, it's become about extracting as much money as possible (and thus the adverts are all about winning big bucks because you as a sports nerd know far more about which player will score first than the betting companies do)

Terr_ 1y ago

I'm imagining mandatory disclosures like on cigarette packs, except it's some distribution chart or percentile figure for bankruptcy.

viccis 1y ago

>It could be banned. Would that stop it? Probably not. Absolutely asinine statement. Yeah no shit it's not going to deter the most degenerate of gamblers of seeking out a place to make bets. Will it stop apps being advertised on TV and the app stores from grooming new people into it? Yes. Will it stop people mildly curious from betting on sports? Yes. If "it" in "stop it" is "all sports betting" then no, obviously. If "it" is "sports betting in normal society" then yep, it will stop it. Anyone obfuscating this simple fact wants to make money off of more human misery, remember that. Remind me of how cigarette usage has gone in nations that ban advertisement of it.

skippyboxedhero 1y ago
The point OP is making is almost completely unrelated to addiction. If someone is a gambling addict, they are going to do it. One of the issues with gambling addicts in the US before legalization is that they would use illegal bookmakers, and then get their legs broken. Legalizing is the only way to implement a harm prevention strategy because states regulators can control providers (for example, all states in the US have exclusion lists that they maintain and which providers have to implement, regulators have direct control over operations). In addition, there is also a lot of evidence that if you regulate ineffectively, you will also cause harm. Hong Kong is a classic example where some forms of gambling are legalized to raise revenue (iirc, very effective, over 10% of total tax revenue) but other forms are banned in order to maximise revenue...addicts are the only users of underground services. Sweden have a state-run gambling operator, that operator provides a bad service (unsurprisingly), again addicts are driven to underground services. For some reason the general public perceives gambling as both inherently addictive and something that can only be triggered by gambling being legal. Neither of these things are true. Substances are inherently addictive, gambling is not, the proportion of gamblers that are addicted is usually around 1%...of gamblers, not the total population. And it isn't triggered by gambling being legal, it is a real addiction so is present regardless.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > If someone is a gambling addict, they are going to do it Gambling marketing, and the gambling industry, facilitate the production of gambling addicts.

watwut 1y ago

> It's certainly bad for individuals, and by extension their families. When gambler makes debt, then the partner gets half the debt in divorce. And they have to pay it. It is not bad for families just "by extension". It is directly harming the family members even after the divorce.

DiggyJohnson 1y ago
Personal gambling debt is individual unless credited to a joint account no?
- watwut 1y ago
  In marriage, stuff you acquire during marriage is "common" no matter which accout you used. The same applies to debt. (Pre existing assets and debts are purely yours). The common stuff then splits half half unless there was prenup or something.
  - howard941 1y ago
    This very much varies state-by-state (ignoring prenups and emergency med treatment as edge cases). In my marriage and state (FL) debts incurred by me remain my own. Wifey owes none of it. Compare with states that have community property or purchases made as tenants by the entirety.
- toast0 1y ago
  I live in a community property state, all of my accounts are owned by the marriage regardless of how they're titled. I would imagine legal debts are similar. There's some exceptions and I suppose gambling debt could be one, but I would expect the default to be that the debt holder could collect from assets held by either spouse.
  - bruce511 1y ago
    This will vary greatly from one jurisdiction to another. It can also depend on the specific kind of marriage. Yes, some marriages are "community of property", some are not. Even in community of property though some debts may be on the individual not the couple. So one cannot really talk in generalities regarding this.

pjc50 1y ago

Gambling used to be so illegal in the US that it used its global Internet jurisdiction to shut down poker companies located outside the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg

bongodongobob 1y ago
And yet every bar I go to, as far back as I can remember, has slot machines and somehow that doesn't count? Even gas stations. Never understood this.
- mpalmer 1y ago
  Scale.
- nickthegreek 1y ago
  That is very much state by state in the usa. My state never had slots in gas stations or bars.
- GenerWork 1y ago
  This sounds like Nevada. I remember arriving in the Reno airport for the first time and being astounded that there were so many slot machines around. Even CVS had slot machines!
  - FergusArgyll 1y ago
    It's wild, first thing you encounter when you come off the plane is just rows and rows of slot machines. Jarring
  - bongodongobob 1y ago
    Nope, Midwest.
- mikestew 1y ago
  Once you left Nevada, I doubt you saw the same thing. If I want to see a slot machine in Washington, I have to go to a casino on a native reservation.

RataNova 1y ago

I do think advertising is the lowest-hanging fruit here. There's no good reason we should be letting sportsbooks run ads during games that are watched by kids

slumberlust 1y ago
Kids are the majority of people I know who bet a lot. Mostly teenagers on the ski lifts talking about parlays and long shots.
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  > Kids are the majority of people I know who bet a lot. Mostly teenagers on the ski lifts talking about parlays and long shots. Woah. What country? I cannot imagine this is happening in Sweden, France, Italy, Austria or Switzerland.

inerte 1y ago

> The games are hosted by very sophisticated companies, that have better mathematicians, and make money. Oh, it's worse than that. In sports betting at least, if the gambler consistently makes money, the companies will ban or limit their gains. It's a scam.

idopmstuff 1y ago

> Let's start with the obvious- in all forms of gambling the gamblers make a net loss. The games are hosted by very sophisticated companies, that have better mathematicians, and make money. > $x is pumped into the system by the punters, $y is extracted, $z is returned. The 'house' is the only winner. This is incorrect, specifically with regard to sports betting. Sports betting and poker are both winnable games. Most people don't win in the long run, but unlike in table games (Blackjack, etc.) there are absolutely winners that are not the house. To be clear, that doesn't mean they're good or should be allowed. I used to be a poker player and enjoy putting some bets on football now, but I've come around to the general idea that sports betting in particular is a net negative for society. Still, if you're going to make an argument against it, it's always going to be a better argument if it isn't built on a basis that's just factually untrue.

bruce511 1y ago
Net loss means that if you add all the players together, the losses exceed the winnings. Yes some individuals win (at least occasionally.) But as a group it's always a net loss (because the house takes a cut.)
- idopmstuff 1y ago
  The statement "in all forms of gambling the gamblers make a net loss" is ambiguous as to whether it's the gamblers as a whole or each of the gamblers making a net loss, and while I grant that it reads more like the way you're describing, the later context pushes the intended meaning in the other direction. He says "The 'house' is the only winner," which is as a point of fact untrue - there are also individual gamblers who are winners. Saying this implies he thinks that each of the gamblers is a net loser.

monkeyelite 1y ago

> Perhaps ban advertising Yes. Ban the phone apps and had the ads. Advertising works people, that’s why they pay for it!

borroka 1y ago

Society's desire for regulation of behavior ebbs and flows. Not limited to the US: prostitution was legal and then it was not and now there is a laissez-faire of some kind in some places, in others there are brothels, in others you cannot, strictly speaking, but in practice it is whatever; The consumption of alcohol was initially allowed, then forbidden, and later allowed again. Nowadays, some "thought leaders" are again somewhat pushing, if not for regulation, for public condemnation; Abortion, same-sex sexual relationships, gambling, drugs, they all follow a similar pattern of regulation-liberalization-regulation- (random order), answering to "society" or some prominent voices within or the ever fleeting vibes of the times. In other words, it does not make, strictly speaking, sense that certain behaviors are regulated or prohibited, and others are not.