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I don't think you can kill corporate run gambling - people will just use some offshore website instead. It might be something we should treat more like smoking

I don't think you can kill corporate run gambling - people will just use some offshore website instead. 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.

pstuart 1y ago
As someone who believes in legalizing all drugs and in general "personal freedoms", I'd add recreational drugs to this list. 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.
- toasterlovin 1y ago
  On the other hand, legit players can lobby for their interests, whereas criminal cartels generally can’t.
kelseyfrog 1y ago
You can't kill murder; murder will always exist. Surely, like murder, and other negative outcome behaviors, we can reduce the occurrences, right?
- cheeze 1y ago
  Yeah. Just like we do for smoking. I don't think I get your point. Are you agreeing with the prior commenter?
- mattm 1y ago
  If murder was legal, surely the amount of murders would increase.
rafale 1y ago
Gamblers know the odds are stacked against them yet they end up stuck in a psychological prison within their own brain that they can't escape from even if they realize what they do is harmful. 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.
- no_wizard 1y ago
  >For big gamblers, we can have "qualified gamblers" rules like we do for qualified investors. 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.
  - skippyboxedhero 1y ago
    His take isn't new. It is deployed in part in the UK. Effectively, gambling companies adopt the role of the state conducting a full audit into your personal circumstances, income, assets, bank statement, utility bills to work out whether you can gamble. 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).
toomuchtodo 1y ago
> I don't think you can kill corporate run gambling - people will just use some offshore website instead. 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-fraud/ 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)
TSiege 1y ago
This is a problem that literally had minimal societal consequences just a few years ago before the 2018 supreme court ruling[1]. I don't see why we shouldn't just try to move the laws back to how things were in 2017. Source 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_Athletic_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...
paxys 1y ago
> people will just use some offshore website instead 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.
- vhcr 1y ago
  This is not a hypothetical, people already do it like that in my country (Argentina), you send your money to a person that buys tokens using cryptocoins, since these websites don't comply with the local regulation, even kids are addicted to gambling.
  - amrocha 1y ago
    When your government is as incompetent as you can get while avoiding a revolution people start to gamble. 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.
- Vaslo 1y ago
  People buy illegal stuff and dark markets all the time. Even a decade ago I knew a guy who was buying dope and having it mailed to him from the dark web and he was minimally technical. They know there is a risk but they are willing to take it. This isn’t like buying a lawn motor - people will take some fraud as “acceptable losses”.
  - 1y ago
crystal_revenge 1y ago
Even in your comment you can see the challenge with education and gambling. In practice the return on a dollar (just a different formulation of EV) is often legally mandated to be something around 0.9 and for many games is very close to fair. 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. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_ruin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_ruin
cogman10 1y ago
I'd ban all advertisement and put a market cap on these companies before mandatory breakups happens. 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.
vlovich123 1y ago
If that were the case then the SCOTUS decision legalizing it nationwide would not have been as impactful as it was.

pstuart 1y ago

As someone who believes in legalizing all drugs and in general "personal freedoms", I'd add recreational drugs to this list. 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.

toasterlovin 1y ago
On the other hand, legit players can lobby for their interests, whereas criminal cartels generally can’t.

kelseyfrog 1y ago

You can't kill murder; murder will always exist. Surely, like murder, and other negative outcome behaviors, we can reduce the occurrences, right?

cheeze 1y ago
Yeah. Just like we do for smoking. I don't think I get your point. Are you agreeing with the prior commenter?
mattm 1y ago
If murder was legal, surely the amount of murders would increase.

rafale 1y ago

Gamblers know the odds are stacked against them yet they end up stuck in a psychological prison within their own brain that they can't escape from even if they realize what they do is harmful. 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.

no_wizard 1y ago
>For big gamblers, we can have "qualified gamblers" rules like we do for qualified investors. 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.
- skippyboxedhero 1y ago
  His take isn't new. It is deployed in part in the UK. Effectively, gambling companies adopt the role of the state conducting a full audit into your personal circumstances, income, assets, bank statement, utility bills to work out whether you can gamble. 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).

toomuchtodo 1y ago

> I don't think you can kill corporate run gambling - people will just use some offshore website instead. 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-fraud/ 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)

TSiege 1y ago

This is a problem that literally had minimal societal consequences just a few years ago before the 2018 supreme court ruling[1]. I don't see why we shouldn't just try to move the laws back to how things were in 2017. Source 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_Athletic_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...

paxys 1y ago

> people will just use some offshore website instead 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.

vhcr 1y ago
This is not a hypothetical, people already do it like that in my country (Argentina), you send your money to a person that buys tokens using cryptocoins, since these websites don't comply with the local regulation, even kids are addicted to gambling.
- amrocha 1y ago
  When your government is as incompetent as you can get while avoiding a revolution people start to gamble. 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.
Vaslo 1y ago
People buy illegal stuff and dark markets all the time. Even a decade ago I knew a guy who was buying dope and having it mailed to him from the dark web and he was minimally technical. They know there is a risk but they are willing to take it. This isn’t like buying a lawn motor - people will take some fraud as “acceptable losses”.
- 1y ago

crystal_revenge 1y ago

Even in your comment you can see the challenge with education and gambling. In practice the return on a dollar (just a different formulation of EV) is often legally mandated to be something around 0.9 and for many games is very close to fair. 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. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_ruin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_ruin

cogman10 1y ago

I'd ban all advertisement and put a market cap on these companies before mandatory breakups happens. 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.

vlovich123 1y ago

If that were the case then the SCOTUS decision legalizing it nationwide would not have been as impactful as it was.