Legalizing Sports Gambling Was a Mistake

https://archive.ph/CmsIZ

But a much easier argument against sports betting is that it ruins the sports. Players throw. They get good at subtly cheating. The gambling apparatus latches itself to the sport, to the teams and players, the umpires and judges, the sporting organizations. With this much money on the line, it's not a matter of if but when games are thrown, cheated -- the bigger the game, the bigger the incentive. It's even easier now because of the amount of side/parlay betting that is available. It exhausts the spirit of competition.

Sports gambling is diametrically opposed to sport itself.

It is spreading as a cancer. This month the central bank published a report saying that in August 20% of the Bolsa Família, the largest money transfer program for very poor Brazilians, was spent on these bets.

Out of the 20 million people that receive it, 5 million made bets during that month. This is 2 billion reais (about $450M) spent in a single month by the poorest Brazilians.

It's a cancer. Everywhere you go there are ads. The influencers, the biggest athletes and musicians are marketing it.

Although I tend to be liberal, this needs to be heavily regulated.

Many years ago I worked at a company that had Ladbrokes in the UK as a customer. On my first visit to London, I noticed their storefronts and found them appalling. They were some of the sorriest, shabbiest public spaces I'd seen, clearly designed to extract resources from the least well off.

I don't really buy any of the arguments in favor of widespread legalization (and I include state lotteries in this). I could be ok with legalization for a few big events like the NCAA tournament because clearly there is some demand that must be met, but we should not be enabling gambling as a widespread daily habit.

Of course there will always be black market gambling and the state cannot protect its citizens from every evil, but nor should it actively enable them.

When I was six, my father burned me with a lesson. We were at a fairground, and I saw a pyramid of cans. The standard game: throw a ball and knock em down. At six years old, I was already a good throw. I knew I could win. My father made me an offer. He gave me the money for the game and told me that was my lunch money. If I won, I'd get both lunch and the win otherwise .....

Of course, even the best six-year-old has a very low chance of knocking over those weighted cans. The house wins. I went hungry that day.

Since then, I’ve had a terrible reaction to gambling. Casinos make me feel ill just walking through and seeing all the sad faces. I’ve never bought a lottery ticket in my life. I always feel that hungry belly when I think of gambling and it turns me right off.

No one was going for any team in particular. They were cheering for their bets to win. I lost all interest in the idea of me ever gambling after that.

There are certains sports I love to watch because I love the game. Gambling would ruin that for me. No thanks.

Gambling is inherently exploitative and no amount of regulation will align the incentives for commercial operators. You also don't want to ban it outright, as it may descend into the underground otherwise, so this looks like a reasonable area for the govt to take direct control.

I don't think anyone would call blanket banning "elegant", even if it would be the best solution.

"They estimate that legal sports betting leads to a roughly 9 percent increase in intimate-partner violence."

I'm sure the numbers are probably right, but I can't help but feel some of this is reaching a bit - many population causation studies seembto be more about triggers than true root causes. Just because betting triggered this doesn't mean betting needs to be banned. What this should lead to is better support and treatment for people affected by this type of violence. If it's not betting that set it off, it would be some other stressor (probably also money related or feeling like a loser). Trying to fix the person's behavior such as impulse control and anger management would be much better than progressively banning everything as the next trigger emerges.

At the very least, ads should be banned or require nasty images like tobacco products.

Normalising it? Yes.

Unfortunately, our culture seems to have two settings: legal ban; full celebratory embrace. We don’t seem to be able to handle tolerating and discouraging (see smoking, which is slowly being banned across the once-civilised world).

Should the awesome power of the State be deployed to wield violence against people who bet money on sports? No, that’s insane. Should there be half a dozen betting ads every hour on primetime TV? No, that’s crazy too.

The largest are probably mobile betting and allowing for instant credit card deposits.

There is also the fantasy of being able to win money but the reality that if you actually win money in a consistent fashion, you will be either kicked-off or your action will be severely crippled.

I'd like to think the emerging prediction markets, like Polymarket, are much fairer systems, especially for winning players, and would be much better than sports books like DraftKings, FanDuel, etc.

But, what's the alternative?

Going to a live event, for two bad teams, for four people, cost me over $500 a year ago. I can't afford that.

Youth sports?

I live in Florida, and was hoping Jai Alai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jai_alai) would be a weird respite, but that was the original gamblers refuge.

I've known several gambling addicts down through the years, the damage they did to their financial and family lives was tragic. Divorce was almost a given, homelessness occurred on several occasions. Being shunned by their parents and siblings sometimes followed after money was borrowed and never paid back.

Two things I never could understand after all the above. First, I couldn't get any of them to attend GA meetings after I offered to attend with them and second, why they ever thought they had a chance to win consistently in any gambling endeavor when the gamble itself is connected to a computer. (Yes, I'm saying cheating can be involved. Imagine!)

I strongly believe it is better to have something legal and well regulated than illegal and left to illegal operators.

This is true for a number of vices.

With legalisation should come strong regulation, including advertising bans.

The UK made this mistake when they strongly de-regulated gambling in the early 2000s, it seems the US did not learn from that when legalising.

* If apps detect compulsive behavior, they could go dark on your phone for a day/week/month/year

* All bets could have delayed payoffs (e.g. greater than 10 minutes [0]) to avoid optimizing for a quick dopamine hit

* Apps could be linked to a credit score/measure of financial health and allow larger bets for people with higher credit scores, or they could stop you from placing bets if there's evidence of negative impacts on your overall financial situation.

In general, the question of: how can we let consenting adults take risks that they find pleasurable (drugs, sex work, gambling, free diving, etc.) while also limiting the worst harms and/or protecting the most vulnerable people, is under-discussed relative to its importance, IMO.

[0] https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1822382269669228822

Food, gambling, etc. are all backed by hordes of brilliant well paid people trying to get you to ruin your life so they make money. On the other side is just regular people like us stressed out trying to survive.

This isn't some "freedom" issue, it's an incredibly huge power asymmetry and I think "we the people" need protection from these forces

* If the thing you sell is addictive you cannot advertise it.

* The thing must clearly tell buyers it is an addictive product designed to extract money from you for the rest of your life.

* It should be taxed such that society can pay for the costs of the addiction.

* If it's gambling you can only wager low stakes. If it's food we need to draw the line on how much added sugar, salt, or other bullshit can be used to make food more addictive

* Deposit limits, per day/week/etc to limit the damage someone could do and also to limit money laundering. This could be self imposed or regulator imposed.

* Withdrawal limits. This was mostly to limit money laundering.

* Wager limits, per event/day/etc

* Self exclusion for a certain time period or forever. This kept people from using our stuff to make bets based on our best efforts to identify them. Sometimes we had a government ID, sometimes we didn't.

* Other exclusions, i.e. blacklisting for things like not paying child support.

* Geofencing to prevent people from using our app outside of the legal jurisdictions. Also, geofencing to only allow people to register for our apps in certain locations, such as a casino. That could easily be extended to prevent people from using the apps outside of a casino, but I don't think that was required anywhere.

These things are technically possible and would greatly help if required globally, short of an outright ban.

Contrary to popular belief, running a sportsbook is a terrible business. Look at draftkings for instance. They’ve gotten gambling legalized nearly everywhere yet are still wildly unprofitable.

I guarantee you that they will never be profitable unless they are granted a monopoly which will never happen.

It’s fairly obvious. If you travel to Vegas and go to the Aria, one of the premier casinos on the strip, you will have to walk around to find the sportsbook. When you do you may be surprised to see that it’s not out in the center of the floor inviting people in, it’s in a dark remote enclosed corner that feels like a large coat room.

Now ask yourself why that would be? And why do casinos devote so much floor space to slot machines and table games?

Betting apps offer the terrible aspects of running a book- relatively unwealthy gamblers with the inability to cross subsidize more profitable games and alcohol along with the added drag of attracting disloyal users who can and will easily use other books to compare lines or take advantage of promos.

A lot of the points in the article are valid. I have two major issues with online sports betting (OSB) in the US.

1. Sports betting advertising before, during, and after games is horrendous. There is no way to watch sports without being bombarded. Obviously, this is a huge issue for problem gamblers. Sports become unwatchable.

2. Self-exclusion is impossible. There's 40+ sports betting apps available. There is no centralized body a person can say "hey don't let me bet anymore" and then be automatically restricted from betting across all apps. This is something I think we can help with in the near future.

So what can be done now? I don't think OSB is going to be redeclared illegal. I don't think that would be a good idea either. Millions of people have started sports betting. If it becomes illegal, it won't make them stop.

Happy to discuss this further. Email is in my profile.

Reshape the entire industry to be a decentralized/house-edge-free form, where any one player has a net 0% gain/loss outcome over time. Regulate what bets can be placed and their payouts so that winners win less amounts and losers lose less amounts (i.e. you don't get wiped out).

It will feel like gambling, but overtime is no different than coin flipping for lunch money with a coworker every day. Essentially math away the "house always wins" part.

The whole puritanical notion that anything pleasurable is dangerous and needs to be strictly regulated/outlawed is not a good reality, doesn't really do anything except make people lie about what they really want to do (which causes obssession and addiction), and honestly needs to be buried with all the other outmoded concepts.

I'm getting tired of "addiction" being used as a justification to reduce freedoms. If you want to fix addiction, fix the underlying causes instead of banning shit. This involves designing societies where everyone's basic needs are easily met, where people who run into problems can get help easily, where people are encouraged to treat each other equitably, and lowering anxiety and panic. It's hard and doesn't make anyone any money which is why it's not the default state in many societies, but it does prevent these societies from collapsing

But all this howling in this whole topic about how gambling hurts the poor, yet no one is actually talking about how to stop creating poor in the first place - is just sanctimonious virtue signaling. Even if you have a poor friend or relative who got bit by a gambling loss - why is he/she addicted - what did you or society do to address that?

You can make these kind of consequentialist arguments anyway. It's worthwhile discussion. But the legal decision itself wasn't made on a consequentialist basis. The court didn't decide PASPA was illegal because it was socially bad and we'd have a better world without it. The proposed "just ban it outright everywhere" can't happen under the current legal regime. It's fine to propose things that can't happen but we should acknowledge this becomes a hypothetical discussion.

On one hand, this is actively bad for people. You can make the argument that some people win, but the vast majority do not (over any extended period of time). People are hurting themselves and the people around them. I personally know so many young guys who have lost thousands of dollars that they really didn't have the opportunity to lose on sports betting in the last few years.

On the other hand, why would I restrict someone's freedom to choose to make a poor decision?

I find this so hard to make a personal judgement on because I see myself going both ways in my own life. I drink alcohol despite it being bad for my health, but I scoff at smoking cigarettes for the same reason. You can actively justify either of these, but that's not the point I'm trying to make. I just don't know where we begin to restrict people's choices when it primarily affects them - the obvious exception being their friends and family who are affected as well.

Do we step in and prevent this transitive negative effect? I'm really not sure.

I've seen some other comments mention having heavier regulation. That idea makes sense as a middle ground to me, I guess (although I'm really not sure).

In the end these things are a trade-off: a very large part of the population has no problems with them and enjoys being able to gamble/drink or eat. A small portion does have serious problems.

Should these people be protected against themselves, at the price of forbidden most people their little pleasure? Personally, I think not.

But legalizing advertising for sports gambling was definitely a mistake.

In September, the central bank released a report revealing that in August, 20% of Bolsa Família — the largest cash transfer program for Brazil's poorest citizens — was spent on betting.

Out of the 20 million recipients, 5 million placed bets during that month, amounting to 2 billion reais (approximately $450 million) spent in just one month by the most vulnerable Brazilians.

Every day we are reading reports of family loosing their cars and saving because kids were betting, which is crazy.

https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/business/2024...

The sooner we get rid of money, the sooner people will just bet their imaginary internet points on internet gambling instead of their real life right-to-live-points, and everybody will be better off.

1) In Brazil there's an entire industry of athlete's from lower divisions and agents that sells transient results that is taken in consideration in the bets.

For instance, number of corner kicks, number of fouls, yellow cards and so on. It's hard to trace it back the intention and there's a player from the National Team being investigated due to betting patterns [1].

With 80% of players earning less than USD 300 [2] when someone have the offer to take USD 10000 to receive 3 yellow cards in 5 games, it's hard to say no for those guys.

2) The problem that I see with the regulation is that not only in the sporting and social aspects (that is bad) but the money laundering and the lack of tracing in the money that goes in bet houses.

For instance, Germany has some regulation around the topic [3] but the reality if you go in some Tipico or some small bet house you can carry EUR 10000 and bet in anything, no questions asked; that's the reason why a lot of people around the world come to Germany for sports betting [4].

Anecdotally speaking, an old colleague used to manage some players in Brazilian 3rd division and he had some connections with folks in places like Germany. Before the game he already knew the bets and then just told to the players what needs to be done (e.g. I want a penalty kick after 80min, or a yellow card before 70 minutes) and after the bet being payed the agent just passed the money to the players (more or less 30%).

[1] - https://onefootball.com/de/news/fa-want-to-ban-lucas-paqueta...

[2] - https://g1.globo.com/trabalho-e-carreira/noticia/2022/12/04/...

[3] - https://cms.law/en/int/expert-guides/cms-expert-guide-to-onl...

[4] - https://n1info.rs/biznis/fatf-nemacka-raj-za-pranje-novca-go...

I’ll never understand the mentality of “please govern me harder daddy”. If someone wants to self destruct they’ll find a way to do so. Taking away something that millions of disciplined people also love while simultaneously setting a precedent to let the government tell you what to do seems like a foolish and slippery slope.

Those who support unconstitutional overreaches by the federal government are perhaps not considering the unintended consequences of eroding the principle of governing in accordance with such constitutional limits. They ought to consider a type of government restriction that they oppose and find harmful, and consider how much worse it is when the federal government can nationalize it.

Second, once someone reaches the age of consent, they should be able to do things that run a high risk of ruining their lives. The only type of restriction that I could possibly see being justifiable for activity like this is on advertisements for such activity, which could be required to disclose risks and/or not communicate falsehoods.

They sold their souls.

Sports Betting was supposed to create jobs, and it did. But for every job created, several other people's finances were ruined. The vast majority of this revenue is going straight to the people at the top, so it doesn't even create all that many jobs.

Likewise, the lottery is one of the most insidious parts of our society. We dangle the carrot of unfathomable wealth in front of people, and let them spill huge amounts of money into a system that is so unlikely to produce a win that one can realistically conclude that it is a 0% chance. We act like it's beneficial because it funds things like scholarships, but those things could just be offered using public funds without destroying countless lives with gambling. In fact, if we just funded those scholarship with public funds, the impact to taxpayers would be substantially less than the impact on gamblers.

Even when someone eventually wins a huge jackpot, there are tons of stories about how those wins ended up hurting, or in some cases even killing, the recipient. The actual reward of winning isn't what people think it is, because most people who gamble enough to have a chance at winning are not prepared at all to handle that windfall appropriately.

The price paid for gambling is always too high, and dangling immense unearned wealth just serves to bait lower-income Americans into flushing their limited income down the drain in hope of a free ride.

Whatever notion people have about individual responsibility doesn't apply here. This form of exploitation is well understood, and it should not be legal to deceive people this way. The vast majority of gamblers don't understand the math behind it, and vastly overestimate their odds.

I've done my share of casual gambling, and personally understand that it can be a form of entertainment that can be enjoyed responsibly. Unfortunately, that is like saying that you've used cocaine a few times without overdosing or getting addicted: you're the exception, not the rule.

The Progressive ideal, which started as only a faint glimmer in the US at the turn on the 20th Century, has grown to dominate our social mores over the past 50 years. For most people reading HN, it's all they have ever known. But there is a serious cost. We infatilize our adults and produce generations of new citizens paralyzed by anxiety and (to a large extent) incapable of tolerating the faintest hint of discouragement.

But at least fewer of them slip through the cracks.

Since many of you have commented about regulation, check out the SAFE Bet Act https://tonko.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=...

Also, the GRIT Act may bring much needed federal funding into the prevention and treatment system across the US. https://www.ncpgambling.org/advocacy/grit-act/

By this logic, we should ban cars because 5% of drivers experience collisions every year. Or maybe we should ban Free to Play mobile apps (5% of users result in 70% of the profits). Or maybe we should ban firearms, because a small number of users harm people.

There are always risks with every industry in regards to the safety of those who participate. What is the "acceptable" number of problematic cases for a billion-dollar industry to be legally acceptable?

I've made a ton of bad decisions in the course of my life. And I'm all richer for it. Don't take that away from me.

I despise the nanny state policies of my homeland Finland. I've been a nomad for the past decade and a half due to it because I don't want to settle down in a place where people think they should be able to force other people to not make what they (or "the majority") think are stupid decisions.

You will always find justifications once you start going down the rabbit hole of "what's best for them".

Regulation, however, might be OK. In the UK we are now at a stage where bookmakers have to do Know Your Customer (KYC), checks to do identity validation, you can't gamble with credit cards (debit cards are fine), and "VIP Schemes" to incentivize those who gamble the most to gamble more are not allowed. All sites have voluntary limits for players on deposits or timeouts, and a lot of TV ad spots are about staying in control of your gambling.

What's interesting is that most of this (except KYC and CC deposits), are not government-mandated - the industry has gone down a path of self regulation to try and keep the government out of it.

There's expected to be some announcements in this space in coming months, and there is a fear of "affordability checks" being mandated - to bet above, say £100/month, you'll need to show bank statements that indicate you can afford a higher level of betting. The fear is that this will just mean rich business for the offshore black market guys on WhatsApp and Telegram who are ready to move in.

I think what might actually be a better solution is for us to talk more widely about "value", and educating bettors. There is little value in slots or casino games - you will rarely, if ever, be in a place to get +EV on those, and when those situations do arise it requires an incredible amount of expertise and insight to exploit them, far more than Hollywood or the books you may read suggest you need (Ed Thorpe invented the World's first wearable computer to get +EV on roulette).

However, sports betting is different. Value is often there, waiting to be found. Particularly on prop bets. If you're prepared to do the work in figuring it out, you will either win, or lose more slowly.

As such, I'd argue more education and more controls around bad habits seems a better way to go than banning it outright.

But then, I'm happy to do that work, I enjoy it, it's fun. Most people don't, and they're losing money to me and people like me via a commission agent (the bookmaker).

Gambling, smoking, drinking, drugs, risk taking behaviours, crime.

We can either ban everything, or accept that certain groups of people will just abuse literally anything

The hypocrisy is amazing, many states ban gambling, but have scratches. Online scratchers, state owned digital slot machines. How is that fair when online casinos are banned.

The State has a much lower Return to Player.

With so many things, finding the right balance takes trial and error, and what the right balance is may change as other variables change as well.

We could solve that by banning/restricting gambling.

But it seems that's just a patch on the bigger problem: That our citizens are insufficiently educated to see what is ruining their life and stay away from it.

Sure, some people waste all their money on gambling. But others waste all their money on drugs. Or theme park rides. Or model trains.

Would it not be better to have better training not to waste all your resources on something that doesn't benefit you?

But then I remember that so many are counting on the fact that people will stay uneducated so they can rip them off.

It's the same with the prohibition of alcohol.

In Australia a huge push is on to get it banned from tv.

So much of advertising is pushing stuff that is exploitative of some hope -- wealth, health, etc. -- the makes people susceptible to things with questionable efficacy.

It makes no sense, it is the person's money and life, and it is theirs to ruin as they wish. We are not properties of the state. If a person cannot be allowed to do what they wish with their own money, because they might harm themselves or others as a result, then how can you trust them with driving a vehicle, flying a plane, operating weapons in the military, or even owning a personal weapon?

Every gun sold to a person is a gamble on whether they use it to cause harm on others (same with the things i listed above).

This same logic applies to regulation of drugs in general as well in my opinion. Regulating other peoples lives is not the purpose of the government, especially when they're not harming others or being a nuisance to the public.

But turbocharged advertising and online “engagement” and “monetization” hyper-optimization by unscrupulous growth hacker types who heavily optimize for excessive and reckless gambling by targeting, with malice aforethought, people with issues and aggressively try to recruit new people into a risky activity seems maybe even worse?

How about door #3: keep it legal to avoid most or all of the downsides of prohibition, and absolutely fuck up the profitability of hyper marketing it?

So many problems have plausible if not compelling solutions if you always care more about the welfare of the vulnerable than anyone, anywhere, who is getting shit rich by doing harm.

It took a long time, but we finally took the gloves off with Big Tobacco. You can still buy cigarettes, but you so rarely see them anymore. Even I gave up (which I swore I’d never do) because it’s just impossible to smoke most places, they’re not sold everywhere anymore, and it’s expensive as hell.

There will always be diehard smokers, but it’s not the crisis it once was and you still don’t have drug dealers involved.

How is this not the playbook?

There’s a meme/“theory” in retail options trading about “max pain”. Wherein, the stock price will move as to maximize the total amount people lose on options.

I think allowing the betting houses and websites to advertise as prolifically as they have been (with very little restrictions) was a massive mistake. Advertising for sports betting is fucking EVERYWHERE.

And athletes, such as LeBron James, who while already a billionaire, decided to take the money and advertise for betting companies. When you've got enough money to convince a billionaire with a pretty good image to advertise for you, something is amiss.

if it had been up to me, sports gambling should have been restricted to physical locations, and marketing prohibited or highly restricted (perhaps only print advertisements in local markets informing people where they can gamble). perhaps also allow an existing customer to place bets via a telephone call.

the way I think about it is, the main reason you want to legalize a vice is to prevent criminals from selling it.

so you want legal operators to have an easier time doing business than the criminals, so they can outcompete them -- but just barely.

app on your phone and unlimited marketing on the internet and primetime television goes way too far.

Prediction markets are the best way we know of to synthesize the opinions of many parties. They should be protected as a class of economic free speech, but in the US there is an effort to eliminate prediction markets on the most important issues (like the outcome of an election).

Think about what it implies for the government to be against a kind of organized assembly that causes citizens to become more informed and allows individuals to de-risk the outcome of events.

Gambling is a vice, no doubt, but honestly Americans are too puritanical about it.

The cat is out of the bag with sports betting, any teenager can open up a Bovada account with no verification.

I’m happy to talk about advertising and reasonable regulation but banning sports betting at this point seems silly.

Some people are going to gamble, but it should be dangerous. You should have to deal with the mob. It should reflect the risk inherent in gambling. It should be understood as a kind of shady and degenerate thing to do, not like a normal hobby.

The biggest surprise for me was that the people running the company were gamblers too. If someone beat them, then they wanted to beat them back (which made no sense to me… given that the statistics are running over the group, not an individual). If someone beat them badly, then it was okay because it’s good marketing (and the player would always bring that money back, they’d say). They would also say “all gamblers are addicts”. Rivalry with their players high, respect low… Except perhaps for their “Whales” where the social contract between the two parties was more explicit. Also worth noting that from what is saw, 80% of revenue comes from <10% of players.

There is no differentiation to the company between sports, slots, lotteries and other games.There are no noble games, just ways to extract money from confused or vulnerable people. Crash games seem to be deluding people the most currently.

I don’t believe it’s possible for these companies to behave anything close to ethically. Regardless of regulation, the business model is corrupt.

At conferences anyone I spoke to would say “you can’t leave the gaming industry, the money is just too good”. Which is why I promptly left.

Couldn't fully read the article though.

If betting wasn't allowed it would be significant income loss for sports teams as well. Maybe you might think that they don't need that much money, but that is subjective.

It's probably both illegal for some reason and unfeasible because it deliberately limits its own profits, but it would make for much healthier relationships with gambling than what we have currently.

Sports gambling ads have become so pervasive that it’s hard to watch a game without being bombarded by manipulative promotions that say stuff like "BET $5, GET $200 INSTANTLY"...

I became a recreational sports bettor in college through offshore books. I always felt like I was doing something extremely dangerous and so was very careful - probably in large part because of the societal stigma surrounding sports betting. I feel like I benefited from having instilled in me a greater fear of gambling dangers that I wouldn't have now if I just started gambling after seeing all these prominent sports talking heads discussions, social media influencer promotions, and constant TV advertisements.

Trying stricter regulations feels like a no-brainer before totally reverting to a federal ban.

At a minimum, we should match the intensity of regulations for other legal vices: - National min. age of 21 for any state that legalizes sports betting, matching drinking regulations that were set 40 years ago. - Restrict advertising to audiences where you can confidently report that >70% of which are adults >= 21 years old, similar to recreational marijuana advertisement regulations in states like CA. - More intense warnings should follow each ad, clearly emphasizing the risks of addiction and the likelihood of financial loss, similar to the mandatory disclosures in prescription drug ads.

Additionally, for the unique vice of sports gambling and it's associated societal dangers, there should be: 1. More intense restrictions on ads: a. Clearly disclose all stipulations. For example, language like ‘BET $5, GET $200’ should be accompanied by fine print explaining that the bonus bet can’t be withdrawn, and any winnings must be wagered multiple times before withdrawal. b. Transparent statistics of users' outcomes at specific sports book. Something like: "Y% of our customers who have accepted a bonus bet have successfully turned it into real cash in their bank account. The remaining (100-Y)% lose it all." 2. Regulations on sports book's social media accounts promoting individual bettors' winnings - i.e. Sports books shouldn't be able to promote a story about someone winning $100k on a $1 20-team parlay. 3. Roadblocks, at a minimum, on betting losses for vulnerable groups -- e.g. after a bettor has lost X% of their initial deposit/yearly salary/net worth/etc, the bettor's account should be restricted in some way unless they say to a real person on the phone: "YES, I AM AWARE OF HOW MUCH MONEY I'VE LOST. I WISH TO RISK LOSING MORE MONEY." 4. A requirement that all bets be placed with money deposited via debit card/check/cash. A ban on taking on any kind of debt (like using a credit card to deposit funds into betting account) to place a bet seems reasonable.

Many graphics showing how art was swallowed by entertainment which was swallowed by distraction which was swallowed by addiction which is what Silicon Valley wants.

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-202...

If we are hell-bent on forcing people to play this artificial money game against their will, with no opt in or out, they're just born and told they now have to work all their life for this piece of paper that some apes printed, then they should at least have total control over that money, anything less and the entire game is unjustifiably immoral.

Not everyone has their cushy little tech salary like you, the majority of people hate their lives and gambling provides an escape just like drugs, and the slim hope of winning big - something that was taken away from real life. The masses have been drained of any hope of improving their situations the old-fashioned way.

If you want to reduce self-destructive behaviour, make a fairer game, make it a game worth playing, offer decent rewards, make it a level playing field instead of the 1% owning 90% of the game. The average shelter in America costs $500k and the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and you wonder why people are gambling? Fuck me.

As an aside, a lot of smart, high quality people are drawn to the puzzle of sports betting, and are skilled enough to get out of slavery with it, why should those people lose their out? Their intelligence and self-control to beat the game was their birthright, just as an expensive education was likely yours.

Fundamentally, it's an issue of freedom, the right to self-destruct, the right to throw your life away, as an act of protest or otherwise. I wouldn't want to live in a world where I'm not allowed to put everything I have on the line against someone else who's willing to take it on. The government has no business infringing on that basic freedom of exchange between individuals.

And you know gambling will only be the start, eventually they will come for something you like because when it comes to removing freedoms and rights, one thing always leads to another. Outlawing gambling does nothing to change the circumstances that are churning out self-destructive humans, it doesn't fix the root cause, our society is generating broken people and their needs for escape will always be met in any remotely free world.

If what we’re going to have is a society where I’m paying for the housing and health care of other people, I’d like to be able to dictate with an iron fist what the other people are allowed to do and be.

Maybe time to quit?

We have forgotten the deeper reasons that certain things were prohibited or discouraged, assuming that these rules were only there because of a belief in a religion society doesn’t follow anymore. That was a naive view and it turns out that many “old” rules are actually pragmatic social codes disguised as beliefs. This isn’t limited to a particular tradition, either: pretty much every major religion has frowned upon things like gambling.

And so in the absence of any real coherent philosophy that aims to deal with complex problems like gambling, addiction, or excessive interest rates, you’re only going to get an expansion of what is already dominant: markets.

Don’t expect this to change until knowledge of ethics and philosophy becomes widespread enough to establish a new mental model for thinking about these issues.