and the idea of advertising gambling on television wasn't even something conceivable?
and, even more so, the idea that sports entertainment channels would be directly involved in the operation of gambling of was just completely beyond comprehension?
> All those serving hard time in prison for sport gambling crimes should be pardoned.
That is certainly on the table... as long as they have a couple of million stashed away to put into World Liberty Financial and the charges are federal.
If it does, I’m more open to it. I don’t think it does. It’s a minuscule industry, macroeconomically spwaking, with massive negative externalities. I think regulating the marketing and conduct of industries proximate to addiction is something productive societies do. (On the other side of the spectrum we have the Qing.)
But it captures a truth. States see lotteries as a funding source. Kalshi and Polymarket are combined valued at the GDP of Iceland (or alternatively, 13 Greenlands).
Casinos are run as a productive part of Nevada’s economy. Lotteries, too, on average, at least in some places. Our liquor and now cannabis industries are economic engines. It isn’t ridiculous to expect gambling apps to wind up in a similar place.
Depends. I imagine the opportunity cost of alcohol and cannabis outweigh their benefits from lost productivity. So likely those industries merely give an illusion of positive economics
The economic windows are less broken when people smoke themselves stupid than they are when we send state violence after those people. This goes for most "bad" things. (State) violence is just that destructive to productivity. See also: prohibition.
It's obviously a joke, but joking that a bad thing is actually good because of some surface-level benefit does raise the question of whether it even has that surface-level benefit.
What a strawman. Murder is done to other people. Gambling is something people do themselves consensually. Murder is banned and people universally condemn it. Gambling is banned and people have always been generally tolerant of it.
These are systems completely designed to prey on vulnerable people, addicts who can't control their impulse to gamble. That's their purpose. I think it's worth regulating intentionally predatory and harmful industries.
When making decisions like this, one should consider not just the desired consequences of the policy, but the difficulty in actually implementing it. Alcohol and narcotics prohibitions fall short here.
It's hard to fully prohibit gambling (because you can play poker around a table, and it's better if that's legalized). It's much easier to prohibit banks from interacting with casinos and TV networks from letting them advertise, as those are large businesses who want to be compliant. That doesn't make gambling itself illegal, but cuts off most of its oxygen.
The problem though is that technically, legally most of this stuff is no longer classified as "gambling". It's now a "prediction market" of which team will win the game.
That's a specific problem of corruption in the current administration. It's not even clear whether this obviously absurd theory of classification will hold up in court, Arizona is already fighting it.
I don’t really gamble. But I agree with you. Prohibition is never the answer.
Our current regime, however, is one where bartenders face zero liability for their patrons’ drunk driving. Making gambling companies liable for problematic gambling is a good start. Banning gambling ads, within apps and without, is a great end. I’d also argue for a cap on bet sizes, but I’m open to being talked out of that.
You actually want to ban bet maximums. Regular people get destroyed making small stupid bets on nonsense like freethrows for benchwarmers. Apps only offer those because they put a low max bet so they have little risk on a wager that is impossible to price accurately. If they couldn’t set such a low max then they couldn’t offer those nonsense wagers.
prohibition
noun
pro· hi· bi· tion ˌprō-ə-ˈbi-shən also ˌprō-hə-
Synonyms of prohibition
1
: the act of prohibiting by authority
2
: an order to restrain or stop
Let's combine the idea of hyper-targeted advertising based on mass data collection with custom tailored addicted substances.
If I design a chemical that will specifically make you fasterik so dependent on it that you'll do any sexually depraved things that a line up of random strangers want so that they'll give you pocket change so that you can get another hit of that chemical should it be illegal for me to surreptitiously give it to you in a product that you buy from me?
There's a fine line between prohibition and all-out attack, everywhere all at once, from TV internet and sports, trying to get everyone addicted to gambling, from 9 to 99 years old.
Like... cigarretes aren't prohibited. But you're hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't agree that we're MUCH better off now with full advertising bans, indoor smoking bans, bans on sales to minors, steep tax, etc, than what we were in the 70s with disgusting cigarrete smoke everywhere.
That's quite a straw man. Drunk driving is and should be illegal because it puts the lives of others at risk. Alcohol is legal because it only puts the health of the drinker at risk. Generally in a free society we accept that adults should be free to make decisions that harm only themselves.
It's interesting to be arguing that gambling doesn't put others at risk in the comments to a post about a broad trend of collective harm associated with loosened controls on gambling. Do you think these people exist in a vacuum?
On top of that, sports betting inevitably leads into match fixing, threatening of players etc.
I believe most of the negative impacts you're referring to are covered by existing laws concerning fraud and consumer protection. I'm in favor of making truly fraudulent and predatory behavior illegal. I don't see any evidence that the "collective harm" you mention from the article is anything other than individuals making bad financial decisions.
I believe that I, as a responsible adult, should be allowed to gamble for entertainment if I want to, and my right to do that shouldn't be taken away because a small minority of the population has low impulse control.
> I don't see any evidence that the "collective harm" you mention from the article is anything other than individuals making bad financial decisions.
Legalized gambling establishments do very little besides extract money from visitors and project negative externalities into their surroundings.
> I believe that I, as a responsible adult, should be allowed to gamble for entertainment if I want to, and my right to do that shouldn't be taken away because a small minority of the population has low impulse control.
You can believe that, and be correct in theory. In practice, the "small minority" doesn't appear to be small enough under the current regulatory regime.
It's no different than the regulation of controlled substances and other vices. Or do you have an issue with that as well, and feel you should have the right to consume as much heroin as you want?
I'm pretty liberal when it comes to drugs. I think it's a case by case basis, but I do believe that heroin and most other drugs should be legal and regulated. As long as there's demand, prohibition just leads to black markets, funnels money to cartels, and consumers ultimately get a less reliable and more dangerous product.
I don't consider those off limits for recreational consumption in safe doses. If fentanyl were legalized, I would see a strong argument for restricting the sale of large amounts of pure fentanyl. Fentanyl lollipops with small doses, I think would be fine.
Regardless, I don't think we should stretch the metaphor between gambling and drugs too far. They are fundamentally different things.
They aren't that different, in that they are addictive, provide no value to society other than entertainment (which is not worthless by any means, but not something that is very heavily weighted in a cost/benefit analysis), and the resulting behavior of addicted individuals is highly negative and has an impact well beyond the addicted individual.
You are on an extreme fringe to put it mildly. It is your right to hold that opinion, but it also means that there's no real point in discussing this with you from what I can tell.
And yet you can't do a quick Google search to understand that "expecting adults to act like adults" is a ridiculous idea when 80% of people have NPC agency
Prohibition was a mistake and it goes a long way of sorting how people will act stupid regardless
and the idea of advertising gambling on television wasn't even something conceivable?
and, even more so, the idea that sports entertainment channels would be directly involved in the operation of gambling of was just completely beyond comprehension?
ahhh, the remote, halcyon, bygone days of 2018...