Gambling seems to have become absolutely rampant in the last 10 years. Between loot boxes in games, (e)sports gambling, crypto, online gambling sites, and an increasing number of unregulated gambling services as well it's crazy how widespread it is now. I don't know what to make of it.
As an industry, gambling doesn't really produce anything. It is a form entertainment, but a very expensive one for the consumer relative to something like movies. It can also be extremely exploitative. The information imbalance between the consumer and provider is massive and there's a whole industry around innovating new ways to make gambling more appealing and profitable.
But there was a massive advert push once PA did. The PHL sports radio talks more betting than sports. With, of course, the occasional "need help?" disclaimer.
I don’t think gambling is any more escapist than movies, TV, podcasts, games, books, or literally any other form of entertainment. Entertainment is escapism.
Those other forms of entertainment don't have nearly the destructive potential on a person's life and finances that gambling can have. A movie is a $5 one-time purchase, gambling is an endless recurring purchase that may not stop until the person is bankrupt, if they have addictive tendencies.
You write as if you'd consider that a bug, but it's a feature: those lotteries exist to give citizens an outlet for their gambling desires that openly admits that participating is a bad idea. Gambling is a problem not because of the (usually tiny) cut of the house, it's a problem because it distracts addicts from seeking more productive solutions and because of the diminishing returns of money in terms of happiness. State run (or endorsed) lotteries are a damage mitigation strategy that has bad odds by design and they used to serve us pretty well, before sports betting somehow snuck in and took over (same thing happened in multiple European countries)
The odd's are stupidly long, but they aren't lining up to play when the prize is $50m. They're lining up to play when it's $1B+. $2 for a ticket and a chance to become a billionaire.
The decline of meritocracy makes the lottery a rational last-ditch source of hope for the impoverished working class. Without hope, they die. See: deaths of despair.
The apologists for this sort of thing are every bit as disgusting as those presiding over it.
For the half of working Americans who earn < $35k/yr, gambling and lotteries and such appear to be the only way to have a shot at a dignified retirement. Like so many problems, I think it can mostly be explained by stagnant wages and gargantuan, historic levels of wealth inequality.
no, a household is a tax filer plus a spouse and any others claimed as dependents. if you are single with no children and file a tax return, you are an entire household yourself. the median income for adults employed fulltime is about 33% less than the median household figure, not half.
That's still not what the original poster was talking about. I didn't check his numbers, but involuntary partial employment is a thing, and I don't see a reason why those people shouldn't be counted.
Unfortunately sports gambling has already become a world-wide problem by this point, for reasons similar to what say apply to the US working people.
I live in an Eastern-European country, and the half-time pause of yesterday's football World Cup opener was more than 75% filled with sports bet adds. This was happening on national television. I can sincerely say that that wasn't the case 10 to 15 years ago.
Okay, according to this article[1], you need a "nest egg" of $2 million to have a retirement income of $80k per year. In 2021[2] the median household income was about $70k. The average household size[3] in the US is currently around 2.5 people, so let's round this up to 3. The poverty line[4] for a 3 person household in 2022 is roughly $23k, for 2 people it's roughly $18k.
Let's say we want a nest egg allowing a two-person household to have a retirement income of $60k: quite a bit below the median household income in the US but still considerably above the poverty line, a net positive considering you don't need to work for a living as long as you don't plan for either one of you to live for more than 30 years.
$60k is 75% of $80k, so that nest egg shrinks down to a mere $1.5 million dollars. But you should aim to live on 80% of your pre-retirement salary, so your pre-retirement salary should therefore have been $75k. In order to get there you need to set aside 15% of that $75k household salary (including any 401(k)s) every year, or just shy of $12k, leaving you with $62k actual income after retirement savings or $5.2k per month for the household (you, your spouse, any children, rent, cost of living and savings for emergencies like health, maintenance or replacements).
If that doesn't sound so bad, consider that this is for someone living just above the median and aiming to maintain a similar standard of living. The further your household income is below the median, the more painful those 15% will be and the only reward will be to get to live in the same level of distress just with a more reliable stable income (assuming it doesn't get eaten up by other expenses you couldn't save for or that arise as a consequence of your already low standard of living, e.g. health issues).
So if that's the "best case" prospect, can you imagine why the chance to become a "millionaire" (and remember: a $2 million nest egg represents a $80k retirement income, a good $10k above the median household income) might be more enticing to a significant chunk of the population than the safer more reliable investments that will at best help them maintain their meager standard of living as long as they don't have any unforseen emergencies?
The exact numbers here are entirely irrelevant. Jobs with higher income generally also offer better options for investment and retirement plans, jobs with low income may not even offer a 401(k). Low income also means any expense represents a larger percentage of your income because costs don't scale linearly, especially when it comes to essentials (e.g. gas prices are the same for everyone and a cheap car may actually get worse mileage and require more frequent repairs compared to a newer model that may still be in warranty).
As an addendum, as I don't want to add even more text to this reply itself, my point is that while gambling is clearly an irrational investment strategy as the odds are so bad compared to conventional forms of investment (some of which are at least guaranteed to not incur any losses beyond inflation), it's entirely understandable why it's appealing if the alternative is to be stuck on the lower end of the income range (or even dropping into welfare) forever.
While wealthy "whales" exist and the gambling industry likes to portray them all as Saudi oil barons with more money than sense so you don't feel bad about them sinking a few billion dollars into gambling as extravagance because they still come out as billionaires, the truth is the most reliable source of income are people (and for cultural reasons especially men) with a low income who see no career path to "striking it big" and think gambling will work for them because beating the literal odds feels more managable than doing so at the job market.
On my way to work I drive past four gambling halls, including two sports betting places. There's another sports betting machine at a nearby bodega. The cars parking in front of these places aren't fancy, they're average at best. The people coming in and out of these places or discreetly trying to smoke outside without being identified by people who might know them are mostly typical workers, more likely to be immigrants than not, often enthusiastically chatting about their dead-end side-hustles or acquaintances of acquaintances who have "struck it big" but often just end up "reinvesting" their gains and losing it all again.
The gambling halls and sports betting places don't provide entertainment. They provide empty promises. Especially with sports betting the gamblers understand it as a game of skill rather than chance and they think they just have to do good enough to become millionaires.
This sort of analysis is common in the financial "advice" (sales, really) industry, but makes no sense. You shouldn't start from your income while working, but from your expected expenses. For example my 3 person household has about 40k/yr in expenses, which is more-or-less independent of my income, given that I make more than that. Once our mortgage is paid off, that will be more like 28k. The average social security benefit is ~18.5k/yr, so that leaves a 10k/yr shortfall at our current lifestyle, which only requires 250k in retirement savings at the 4% rate you're using. Our discretionary spending has inflated somewhat in the past couple years (some of it has been "buy-it-for-life" stuff like furniture), but my wife and I as a 2 person household could comfortably live on just SS once the house is paid off. We'd just be living like we did in our 20s again, and we were perfectly comfortable then. We'd also still have the things we've bought over the years, so really we'd be more comfortable. Presumably there will be some additional health expenses as we age, but as far as I know Medicare isn't so bad that we'd need anywhere close to $80k income in retirement. That additional $10k/yr lifestyle above SS could also be covered by $100/month contributed over 40 years at 7% real returns.
So assuming you can put together a down payment (possibly 3.5% for FHA loans), and assuming you believe in the long term stability of US economic conditions in general, the boring, responsible path to a quiet, comfortable life continues to work even below median income levels.
(This also assumes good health for most of your life. Certainly many people get the short end of the stick there, but many more simply don't take care of themselves.)
You are on to something. Dignified retirement used to mean a pension for years of hard work. We now live in a world of charlatans, and people who allow themselves to be taken advantage of. Paging P. T. Barnum. P. T. Barnum to the sucker born every minute phone.
We also live in a world devoid of conventional wisdom. My grandparents learned that gambling was at best entertainment, they also learned to scrimp and save. My peers don’t learn this, they depend on regulation to protect them against everything, and when there isn’t regulation, they racked up six figures of student loan debt (financing a party lifestyle) and they gamble as a financial strategy.
The point isn’t to shame my peers, nor is it that my grandparents generation was without vice, but that maybe there’s something robust about developing a culture of conventional wisdom as a fallback for an increasingly unreliable government? Maybe policy isn’t the only thing that matters?
Well our grandparents lived in a world (if they were in a first world country) where working a normal job with a stay-at-home mom was enough for a comfortable retirement. This made gambling, at best, the entertainment it was viewed as.
In a lot of ways things are much more difficult now considering decades of wage stagflation and the wealth inequality globally, and this is before we factor in the recent rise in inflation everywhere. If you're not in a first world country you can raise these problems by an order of magnitude easily. It's not difficult to see how people look to gambling as the last sliver of financial hope
I think it probably has more to do with them living through the Great Depression and WWII. I don't know why living in better economic times would have made them less cautious.
I'm not sure how you got less cautious from my comment. In fact I was saying the opposite, that they viewed gambling as a pastime or entertainment, not as a legitimate way to make money. It's when a person considers it a means of getting out of a financial tight spot that they start to make ridiculous and dangerous bets.
One thing about gambling on real-world events (as opposed to dice rolls) is that it puts a price on overconfidence. I was into political betting for a while and found that the more avid amateur bettors usually have a better grasp of the near future than professional pundits do. I'm not sure if the same is true in sports betting, but it wouldn't surprise me.
The gaming industry seems to have been moving away from loot boxes recently. Overwatch and Call of Duty have both stopped using them (replaced with a battle pass subscription with fixed rewards).
TBH I think it's kind of a shame because I never had a problem with this sort of thing for cosmetic only rewards. It's fun to crack them open and see what you get and it doesn't give you any sort of advantage over other players because it's all cosmetic.
Mobile games where the lootboxes contain stuff you actually need to progress in the game (and often require you to spend hundreds or thousands to get to the upper tiers of power/content) are a whole different story but thankfully that doesn't seem to have corrupted the PC/Console gaming space yet.
Are there any big AAA PC/Console games that still use these mechanics? Fifa/Madden I'm assuming but I'm also out of the loop and haven't played a Fifa game since like 2018.
The gaming industry has moved away primarily because legislation has been getting passed in countries like Japan and China forbidding lootboxes in games. It's been a hot topic off and on in Congress and Parliaments around the world for a few years now and I assume game developers are (of course) skittish about it.
To your point about cosmetic-only though, that still exists. Rocket League, which I play regularly, gives out boxes you open and get a random cosmetic with varying degrees of rarity. You can get a net larger amount of these cosmetic boxes by paying for the Rocket Pass premium (something like $10 a season). But the loot boxes only ever contain skins, wheels, etc.
There's still no law for lootboxes in Japan (but have some regulation by industry) so many gacha games still being released. Discussion at congress is minor AFAIK. I suspect that China also haven't completely forbid lootboxes at least, since they also still operate such games. (But anyway China strictly manages releasing games)
The Overwatch lootboxes were purely cosmetic too. The Call of Duty ones weren't. The new CoD battle pass isn't entirely cosmetic either, but the worst it does is give you faster access to weapons that you could have unlocked through regular gameplay for free.
I have a problem with the cosmetic stuff also as it's especially sticky for younger players. My son plays Fortnite and I think a lot about the variety of games I played while growing up, while a huge share of his gaming is the story-lite and constantly restyling Fortnite.
I admire the strategy and the creativity that goes into reinventing it, but I also wonder if this will mean he misses both the diversity and also story-heavy classics from my childhood and onwards. All while chasing gold guns and dance moves.
The addiction to things like Fortnite is stronger than any addiction I've ever seen - and I mean this as a casino owner who watched and often banned people struggling with gambling addiction. It's of a different quality and on another level. Your blackjack addict is essentially a fully grown human who has transmuted his sense of rejection into a wish to lose on cards and thus gain a sense of release, or absolution, having been rejected one more time by the gods of fate. A Fortnite addict is on the make and believes in some ephemeral salvation that might be experienced by temporary success. The former knows when to quit, or at least is encouraged to do so. The latter has hope. The nastiest thing about gambling marketing is selling hope... it should be banned. Yet somehow when you can't win anything at all, it's fine to sell it.
This is inane bullshit. It's a video game. Kids have always fucking loved video games. I and most of my friends used to spend most of our free time playing video games when I was in highschool because they're fun. We now all have stable relationships and 6 figure salaries, and most of us still play a decent amount of video games.
Kids play a lot of Fortnite because it's a fun game with a compelling "just one more round" hook (you should try it, or PUBG or Warzone if you want something a bit less wacky, it's fun!). It's not that insidious. When I was younger my peers were just as obsessed with (pick one of WoW, DOTA, Counterstrike).
I think you may be unaware of the extent to which players, including children, are engaging in real-money gambling at the periphery of video games. Here's some recent reporting on the topic.
Tl;Dw there's a thriving, multibillion dollar gray market for gambling with cosmetic items in games, as well as a market for trading these items for real money. Together this creates stealth real money casinos.
To be fair, WoW caused a couple of people I knew to really suffer in college, and one failed out as a result of a WoW addiction. DOTA addiction caused at least one other to fail out.
When you were a teenager and played CS skins were free. Now the game is aimed at the same age group but entices* kids to spend $2.50 for very low odds of winning at a slot machine and getting a skin worth thousands of dollars.
* Valve banned servers from "Allowing players to claim temporary ownership of CS:GO items that are not in their inventory (Weapon skins, knives, etc.)"
Maybe it's just me, but I'd think it's hard for kids to spend $2.50 if parents don't give them $2.50 to spend. I don't expect kids to make good decisions about money, or gambling, or games. I put that responsibility on the parents.
I don't give my son the means to buy things within Fortnite, but he talks about it frequently, and about peers that are buying things. It can build a bit of resentment that needlessly complicates already-challenging parenting.
My friends and I played a lot of Marathon over LAN and played a lot of poker, and honestly if I were the lord in charge of the network to monetize either, I'd say poker is the less immoral thing to run moderation on and profit for your efforts. That's what I'm trying to say.
One thing that doesn't help is that Fortnite is 'juiced' beyond almost anything ever before it. So if you try to pitch your kids trying a different game (say, with a clever mechanic or thought-provoking story), it is harder for that game to compete.
Eh, I don't think arguing that really good animation/sound/art design being a bad thing somehow is a line of reasoning that results in sensible outcomes.
Be wary of predatory monetization techniques yes, but a bunch of people playing Fortnite because it's a fun, well designed game is not a bad thing.
(I deleted a comment where I worded the same thing much less eloquently. I'll keep the incredulous hostility to the one comment in this thread)
You mentioned playing multiple games across your childhood. I did too, and I have fond memories of dozens of them and various styles (platformers, puzzles, FPS, RPG, etc). My son, left to choose, will just play Fortnite. It feels a bit like an adult only watching Marvel movies and ignoring brilliant movies made in other genres, with other pacing, from other cultures. Or eating fries and drinking Coke while ignoring every other cuisine. Bit of a monoculture.
I've played a fair bit of Fortnite Duos with him (or Squads), and don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the design and so on. It's a fun, clever game. The juicing I'm talking about is the chests, and the skins, and rolling in the latest movie co-marketing. And the way it is all stimulus and barely story.
I had periods of time where I played nothing but a single game, though those were never more than a few months. Definitely seems like it would be good for your son to broaden his gaming horizons somewhat.
Re: "Juicing" - I saw the word and immediately assumed you were using the definition from this classic gamedev talk, well worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg
Yes, I also focused on single games at times, but like you it was for a month or two. He's played almost nothing but Fortnite for two years. He only plays Minecraft or Goat Simulator because I don't let his younger siblings play/watch Fortnite, and he only played a Star Wars flightsim game because I occasionally say he's allowed to play games but only if it's not Fortnite.
Meanwhile, I can recall dozens of really memorable games I played while growing up. And into adulthood, there have been fantastic games with storylines comparable to all-time classic movies. Imagine missing GTA V, Last of Us, Red Dead, HZD and so on because you only ever played multiplayer CoD for years on end; huge shame, IMO.
And yes, I know that video - we tried to use that thinking with a game we developed. I was thinking of juicing beyond visual gameplay. Chests that act like gambling scratchies, etc.
I think the major draw to games like Fortnite that was not around when I (or possibly you) were a kid is the social element. Playing an awesome, gripping story single player game gets them zero social points. Joining a friend and bragging you have the latest movie co-marketing thing in Fortnite gets social points.
I think this is what it was for me. I played a huge variety of games growing up, and it was multiplayer, specifically multiplayer that built stronger ties to socialize that became the biggest draw. Warcraft 3 was a blast online with friends, but Starcraft I could join a clan and always have friends online to play with.
doesn't fit the AAA definition, but counterstrike is very popular and has a f2p + cosmetic-only items for purchase.
I can see how the mechanics around lootboxes specifically can be problematic, but overall, f2p + paid skins seems like a pretty good business model for a game. no one is priced out of the base game, which is a) just nice in general, and b) leads to a healthy playerbase size. the people that care the most end up funding the ongoing support, and the developer is incentivized to make the base game enjoyable enough to be worth purchasing skins for.
Well, there's the online-CCG industry. Magic and Hearthstone and the others are all lootbox, with varying allowances of being able to grind it in the free tier.
I can only speak for MTG Arena. Been playing it 100% for free since a bit before DMU came out. I play pretty much the number of games that give me stuff, often 4 wins/day because I don't have time to play more.
Mythic in Standard is possible (played cheap monoblue last season to diamond 1, mono black now almost mythic) and having some fun drafting. 0% need to invest any money. Obvioulsy I won't have all the stuff but that's fine. I'm ok with identifying one deck I like to play for standard and then just drafting until coins/gems run out (ideally never because the winrate is good enough). I also don't care at all about cosmetics and was happy to see there's even an option to turn them sort of off (hide alternate card styles). I still got quite a lot of free cosmetics as well.
It is however interesting that they do have a pretty good value "first buy" option. I was always curious if it is priced so cheaply to get people from a "I'm a free player mindset" to...well payed once, might as well buy more now (+the friction of setting up payment is gone).
I'm an avid board gamer and I can say very confidently that I would never get into any paper based CCG because the pricing/collection is just ridiculous to me. If it wasn't for the free to play online veryion, I wouldn't play magic (I did buy some of the stuff back in the college days but quickly realized what a money sink this would be). I do/did collected some LCGs and still rank Android Netrunner as one of the best gaming experiences in my life.
The mobile revolution seems like a major factor in a lot of this. People have this little portable device that seems oddly addictive in and of itself and the perfect gateway to wider worlds of pointless addiction.
>Between loot boxes in games, (e)sports gambling, crypto, online gambling sites, and an increasing number of unregulated gambling services as wel
Except online gambling pretty much all of these "technologies" are just "gambling with plausible deniability so that the people who like to look down their nose at the old lady playing slots can engage in it without feeling like a hypocrite.
It's kind like the gambling equivalent of how people who look down their nose at cheap school cafeteria type chicken patties that have plant based filler will happily buy a partially soy chicken patty that costs 5x as much if you market it correctly.
>> As an industry, gambling doesn't really produce anything
This is true. And as you say, it can be exploitive. But the same could be said ten times over for casual "click" games that take money for useless tokens, or AAA games that take money to buy mods, or even socal media sites that use deep/dark pattern UX methods developed originally by casinos to monetize every second of user interaction - none of which even have the possibility of returning some of the money or money-for-time spent by the user. With that - 100% theft - as the modern paradigm, a game of chance or skill with a 95% ROI, and provable stats of winning or losing, regardless of how manipulative its marketing may be, is somehow more noble than selling someone useless tokens or virtual goods, in my opinion. As long as they're adults and know what they're signing on for, let's stop treating people like children. But people who buy virtual goods shouldn't be allowed to play blackjack, IMHO. They're not capable of making financial decisions with their own money.
Call me old school but I grew up in Vegas and never believed in offering a wheel of fortune where no one could win, or a game where someone didn't fully understand their risks and chances.
I don't fully agree. I do think it's a pretty bad and predatory industry but there's a tiny bit of value.
It does provide good estimators of probabilities of real world events. Like if someone would ask me how likely it is that team X will win the world cup I'd look up the betting odds. In general, if there's a betting market for something I'd always use the odds as placeholder until I can come up with a better estimate (which quite frankly seems unlikely). If I were to build an ML model that tries to predict something with a betting market that would be the baseline I'd measure against for example.
It's a very lucrative one for government (i.e., tax revenue), and at least for me, any company serving ads.
Take away the gambling ads and the pharma ads and there wouldn't be much left.
There's next to no incentive for traditional safe guards to safe guard. I'm not suggesting it go bqck to being illegal, only that the ad impressions be limited.
poker, a game of chance, gave me a reason to learn about probability and eventually coding. Gambling and games of chance are an incredible outlet to learn these valuable skills.
This, along with the ubiquity, is the big problem. It's bad enough if you have to go to a physical sports book in a certain state. It's downright exploitative when you're watching a game & you see an ad egging you on to bet, oh and by the way, here's also how to bet with just a few pokes on your phone. Sometimes you can even gamble on credit!
From a 30,000 foot view, one begins to see interconnectedness when you look at the shift in other dopamine mediated processes in modern society (social media, attention spans, sexual behavior, drug use, etc.) I view modern forms of gambling through the same lens.
> but a very expensive one for the consumer relative to something like movies
Doesn't have to be. I gamble on the NFL weekly and in the last 5 years have never lost more than $20 a year, less than the cost of a movie near me somehow.
It's utterly incomprehensible to me that networks are allowed to advertise and then insert gambling content into their broadcasts... you think we would have learned our lesson with cigarette ads. And the saddest part, when I see Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player of all time, who can't possibly need the money shilling BetMGM, my heart breaks
Watching hockey is really awful as a result of sports betting.
When I moved back to Canada from Japan, I wanted to watch the Stanley Cup Playoffs with my kids. (I used to watch Hockey online with my wife but after we had kids, we cancelled the service)
I bought an online package from Sportsnet and was immediately horrified at the number of gambling-related ads. It's not that it was a new concept; horse race betting is a common activity in Japan, and I even remembered a kid from grade 5 proudly betting on some Lotto Quebec games (Mise O Jeu) when I was growing up.
However, I never saw the stuff advertised so blatantly in a media that is so likely to be consumed by families. I resent it, especially since the NHL package in Japan included none of this.
I cancelled Sportsnet subscription after the local team ended their playoff run, and will never subscribe again. I might go watch a local WHL game but I think professional sports are a cesspool.
> when I see Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player of all time, who can't possibly need the money shilling BetMGM, my heart breaks
Years ago, Gretzky gave an interview about doing promotions and he said he initially refused doing any promotions but that his agent convinced him he could just promote products he actually used and liked.
I think of that interview every time I see him on a garish gambling poster that looks like something you would see on the Atlantic City boardwalk.
> his agent convinced him he could just promote products he actually used and liked.
And of course, there's nothing stopping casinos from offering a two-tier system, like how Scientology used to do in Hollywood: the few stars they needed for promotion got to play luxury dianetics, whereas everyone else got milked dry.
What kills me is baseball, where for many years the MLB had a clear and unambiguous policy: no betting on baseball.
Now every game has an official "betting on baseball" sponsor (in various forms) but they still have people on lifetime bans. It feels hypocritical.
For sports like horse racing, boxing, and golf where they are more adult oriented and closely linked to gambling that is one thing. But baseball, football, basektball, and hockey are supposed to be wholesome entertainment but every broadcast feels so seedy now.
I happen to work with some problem gamblers. I find it a detestable practice but I know that's wrong of me to say, I shouldn't judge. What I find interesting in this context is that they all follow sports to a pretty high degree but never once have they talked of betting on sports. Aside from actual casinos and the odd scratcher the main draw from what I see is online operations trading in Bitcoin. From site to CashApp to bank account- it appears to be quite a frictionless experience. People who had never heard of Bitcoin outside the random news story, suddenly are moving thousands of dollars of crypto around and my biggest fear is that gambling will become ever more normalized. I've seen drug addicts maintain more of a semblance of normalcy than I've seen from some of these gamblers. Magical thinking and compulsion, it's really quite jarring to see. Gambling in my opinion tends to insidiousness and perhaps sports betting isn't as bad but I'd rather not tempt people with any of it including lottery. The house always wins.
I know people who have gone gambling with Gretzky, and Gretzky actually gambles a lot. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if his biggest living expense is gambling.
Even the rich lose to gambling. See Michael Jordan, for example.
Pay enough money to politicians and you can make anything legal or be swept under the rug. The Sacklers pushed opiates on millions of Americans, knowing how addictive and deadly they were. Thousands (millions?) died and the Sacklers just paid some hush money in fines and it was all swept under the rug.
It’s amazing that when the opioid crisis hit “rural America” people blame the distributors and called it a “disease”. But when it was rampant in the “inner cities” it was about “moral failings” and the lack of discipline. Even though the drug problem in the inner city was also caused by the government actively propping up governments where it was being produced in service to the Cold War.
Eras? The “tough on crime” happened when Clinton was in office - whose wife supported him and ran for President in 2016, Trump talking about crime before he was into politics who was the President, and when Biden who is the President was in Congress (ie this is not a Democratic or Republican thing). The same politicians who are in charge now were in charge then.
Today minorities are statistically being given harsher sentences for the same drug crimes than non minorities.
It's amazing that sports betting is legalized almost everywhere in the US, and legitimate skill-based games like BigBrain, PlayVS, and others aren't.
Sports betting is the ultimate second-person game; no individual bettor is the one throwing the football. But somehow, I guess on the back of lobbyists, that's more acceptable than first-person games of skill. It's ridiculous.
I agree it's absurd that it's legalized while games like online poker are banned but there is a (small) skill element to sports betting in playing the odds in various ways.
I would consider it somewhere in the middle-ground between poker and roulette. It's possible to have an edge in sports betting, it's just very, very hard to find.
Online poker would be rigged so fas if declared a game of skill. Online poker relies on you trusting the online dealer to not stack the deck,reveal your hand to players representing the casino, etc.
There were many reputable poker sites in the 2000s, Pokerstars being the biggest one, which still exists. It's far more profitable to run a fair site than a scam site. Keep in mind that strong poker players keep a database of the hands they played, and use data mining techniques to improve their own play and to asses the play of their competition.
No such scandals were ever found at other big poker sites, despite that there were more, stronger players at those sites, which also allowed improved scrutiny of their random number generator and the play of everyone involved.
That's not how poker works. It's player vs player, not player vs house. The casino just takes a rake (a cut of each pot). There is no incentive for the casinos to rig the outcome of the game. They make money regardless of the outcomes.
This is not quite an accurate picture, unfortunately. The casino/house earns money on each hand played. Their motivation is to maximize the number of hands played. Their ideal scenario would be where poker was a 0-skill game where a bunch of players would just endlessly play against each other with 0 edge until all the money in the ecosystem was taken up by the house.
In practice losing/casual players tend to lose their money pretty quickly, and winning/skilled players then take that money that they've earned and withdraw it - while waiting for another casual player. The house has every motivation to increase the amount of time it takes for a skilled player to wipe out a casual player. They also benefit from casual players going on 'hot streaks' early on. The goal there is to convince the casual player that they are skilled, and their later losses are "bad luck." The point being to encourage them to deposit more after they lose their money.
Would you enter a four-way game where three of the players were tipping their hands to each other with hand signals and brigade betting against you?
In an online game, how do you know other people at the table aren't side channel communicating? How do you know some of the hands aren't player bots that work for the site where whatever money you lose and they win goes to the casino site? How do you know they don't know the precise order of the "random deck"? Or that they don't know what your hand is?
PredictIt had a limit of $850 on the platform, and even it's in the process of being shut down by the CFTC. I see it as a chicken-and-egg problem because having actual stakes even when miniscule means that smarter decisions are made with allocation; but I feel a lot of users would grow bored or not even use the platform if they could only use play money. My personal favorite example was ran in Popular Science magazine[0] for a few years where users could buy/sell imaginary shares based on the % probability outcome of certain events/discoveries being made by a specified date.
I have tried to get people to use Manifold, but with no actual chance of a payout most people don't see any reason to use it. And most people don't really like the mental thought of "gambling with charity money".
yes, each market has an agreed upon resolver, and you just don't use the market if you don't like it and it never attracts liquidity. its more complicated than that, check it out.
Arbitrary predictions markets sound good in theory until you realize that, as the market grows, eventually you reach a point where there is an irresistible financial incentive for the market participants to intervene in the outcome of the event in order to claim their reward. The most egregious case is "will so-and-so be dead by such-and-such date", which is plainly just an assassination market in disguise.
There are defi prediction markets. As other commenter said big issue is that it leads to fixing. One of the markets was something like "number of tweets this celebrity will have" and eventually someone paid them to start deleting tweets.
The issue, which is similar to how alcohol is mis regulated, is that the legislatures machines returns either to the states general funds (ny) or to the companies and their lobbyists and politicians (ks)
They should have maximized happiness of the users by limiting the pace at which money could be lost, and the odds/ spreads at which it was lost
So I wrote and launched a Bitcoin casino/poker site - started privately in 2008 and launched in BTC back in 2011, long before BTC was considered currency, but I still blocked everyone from my home country (the US) out of a very conservative reading of federal and state laws around the definitions of "game of chance" and "thing of value". I figured it would be legalized one day but only for massive corporations that could buy enough government officials. I thought I could bootstrap my way into it.
That wasn't my big eye-opener on this type of corruption, though. I used my little casino as a testbed for dozens of original card games, slot games, and multiplayer games, many of which had adjustable odds that could be set anywhere from pari-mutuel to a specific house rake over time. I spent a lot of time presenting videos and demos to Indian tribes and cruise lines and individual Vegas casinos with the idea of having the online casino work on their premises, i.e. in the hotel rooms. The issues in the way were many, and mostly regulatory. For instance, in Vegas, casino floor square footage is taxed and regulated in a certain way, and off-floor gaming isn't allowed. On the floor, wifi coverage for gaming-connected systems is charted by heat maps and any system connected to the monetized network has to go through extremely expensive ongoing code / hardware testing conducted by the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB). Mostly at the casino's expense. So even though it was a novel concept at the time to let people join satellites of real poker tournaments on their phones while they were at the casino bar, the casinos figured they would hold off until a provider with deep pockets came along.
So then I had the idea of just licensing my original slots and card games. I had all the statistical analyses worked out and playable versions that were already in use with tons of real world data. Sure, said the NGCB. That'll be $500,000 per review of each game variant before you can shop it to casinos. The cost of each review is nonrefundable if it doesn't pass, and the review process takes a year, and there's a 2-3 year backlog because Bally puts out tons of games we have to review.
Not exactly possible for a lone coder making a modest sum from running a Bitcoin casino that has to lock out one country after another.
It was clear to me that sooner or later, once they figured out a way to exclude tech-side competitors with a history of software gaming from the market, (Galewind, Microgaming, et al - not that any of them are very clean) the powers that be in the US would find a way to reward those lucrative contracts to their buddies and/or whoever paid top dollar under the table.
I ran [edit] provably fair games and published every result. But I never encountered a gaming regulatory body from Isle of Man to Costa Rica to Nevada that wasn't crooked as all get-out. Then again, show me an economic field of supposedly questionable morality that hasn't developed a parasitic class of bureaucrats to grift off people's desire to access it.
Sounds about right. I've worked in the gambling industry and the impression I get is that companies that hold the right licenses are very wealthy and have also held the licenses for a long time, so they are very protective of what they have.
One fun bit of hypocrisy here is Twitch banned all the bitcoin casino sites from being streamed after a scandal, but they have a huge sports betting contract so that's still a ok.
I know. My point was the hypocrisy, particularly because the scandal that triggered the ban was a streamer scamming 300k of "loans" off people to feed his sports betting habit.
Short answer, tribal gaming leadership shenanigans. No betting propositions will ever pass in CA without their approval, but they continuously want way too much of the gambling pie.
1. Prop 26 — sports betting at tribal casinos and four race tracks. Tribal casinos can do dice and roulette.
Issues:
- even more power at tribal casinos.
- “ The proposition also would have created a new way of enforcing some gaming laws, allowing anyone to bring a lawsuit if they believe the laws are being violated and the state Justice Department declines to act”. Basically any card room that was not tribal was going to be sued non-stop.
2. Prop 27 - online sports betting.
Issues:
- even more centralized gambling control by tribes.
- extremely high threshold for gaming companies seeking licenses would have made it unusually tough for small but viable vendors to compete.
They both tried to be too creative, like they both thought they needed to walk on eggshells to get tribal equity or partnership backdoors for sports gambling in the state
If any of them just said “yo, ya’ll wanna have sports gambling everywhere so ya’ll stop getting excluded from apps?” we would have voted for it (imo)
nobody here cares about tribal drama, both propositions heavily miscalculated that and got into immature campaigns against each other, they thought their proposals couldn't stand on their own merits and needed these complicated handouts
If I could warn all Californian voters against approving sports betting, I would. Would I do so for moral reasons? No, I don’t care what people do with their money or their time. But legalized sports betting has ruined advertisements during sporting events. I can only watch so many sports betting ads before wanting to rip out my eyes. That’s all you see now in states where it is legal.
Interest in spectator sports has been on the decline in the US, there is an audience like me that was never into it, despite my upbringing and the cultures’ best attempts at indoctrination
Put money on it though? I’m very engaged
I’m totally fine if the audience completely changes
Then stop watching sports? I’m not in favor of giving the government more power to regulate what consenting adults do that only affects themselves and those directly dependent on them (drugs, alcohol, etc)
Isn’t the purpose of democratic governance to create a society that the people want to inhabit? I want to watch sports, and I want to do so without being bombarded with sports betting ads. If enough people feel like me, perhaps there is a way to create regulations that bring forth such a reality.
Is the purpose of a democratic government to force your will on others? There are more than enough Christians who were in power to pass laws against “sodomy” (homosexual sex), miscegenation (interracial marriage) and all sorts of other morality laws. The purpose of democracy is not to impose the majority’ will on consenting adults.
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch”
No the answer is limited government that doesn’t make laws because someone’s sensitivities are harmed by watching ads.
Just like we overturned laws because someone’s sensitivities were harmed because other people were drinking and even conservative states think it’s no one’s business if another person decides to smoke weed.
So how does that reasoning apply to Jim Crow laws, laws against miscegenation and homosexual sex? Should we always let the rules of majority negatively affect the minority
So let's say there are some issues that are not anyone else's business (and so not government's business). Fine.
But who gets to decide which ones? Who gets the final word?
I think that the question of which questions are the public's business, is itself necessarily the public's business. Which minority concerns are rights which should not be infringed on by the majority, must still be decided by majority.
There's no way around it. Constitutions don't interpret themselves or enforce themselves, much less write themselves, so they don't get you out of this pickle. At "best" they let you abdicate your responsibility for deciding that question.
As I recall, many of those abuses of minorities you list, were protected by such abdication, in that people would rather abide by the US's antimajoritarian process rules than use their majority to immediately fix the abuses.
Yes they recently legalised sports betting in the Netherlands. Didn't have much choice though all the money was going to Malta. At least now it can be taxed!
The gambling industry is like the tobacco industry, in that no matter how legal their product is, it's going to be run by gangsters. Because working with it, you can't in the long run deny the deadly human misery you create and profit from.
So taxing it is no solution. It would have been better to let that foul industry keep corrupting Malta, than let them start corrupting the Netherlands as well. They won't be paying taxes for long.
What sickens me is that in New York, sports gambling, lottery and horse racing are all fully legal, advertised and endorsed (and in the case of lottery, directly controlled) by the state, but it is still illegal to play online poker.
Another reminder that the US is not a normal liberal democracy. It is a very corrupt pseudo-democracy whose extreme wealth lets it have a higher level of development than other countries to which that description applies.
I don't buy your argument that the US's concentration of wealth among a politically powerful class has much bearing on its development. Extreme concentration of wealth among an oligarch class isn't generally associated with socioeconomic development at all, arguably the contrary. Look at mideast petro-monarchy states, or some of the least developed southeast Asian nations as clear counterexamples.
If anything, the US's relatively high level of political liberalness serves as a counterbalance against its own oligarch class.
It’s not just concentrated at the top. The US is very, very wealthy by global standards even at lower percentiles.
The exact rank depends on how you measure, of course: according to Wikipedia, the US’s median income is first in the world; I found some other sources saying it’s fifth. At any rate, very high.
It would surprise a lot of Americans just how wealthy the lower-class are in the US and the luxuries available to them when compared to other places. There are a lot of very poor people in Europe, having traveled a fair bit in Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Italy, which are countries that are ostensibly highly developed.
The safety net in the US is actually quite strong for citizens (there is a huge illegal immigrant class that gets very little) as SNAP benefits (free food) and Medicaid expansion for low-income people are quite generous. If you can get a Section 8 (free housing) voucher you can essentially live without working.
The pros outweigh the cons IMO but there are some very weird incentives, like poor people are far less likely to get married after having children because government benefits are much stronger for single moms with multiple kids. It’s counter-productive.
> The safety net in the US is actually quite strong for citizens
And permanent residents. This used to not be the case but changed in the late 90s for reasons I won't derail the thread on.
> SNAP benefits (free food) and Medicaid expansion for low-income people are quite generous
I'm not sure our definitions of "quite generous" are the same. In Washington State, if you are a family of three who makes under $2,300 per month and pays rent and utilities, you qualify for $383/month in food benefit. In western Washington, this is not enough to pay for an entire month of food for three people. It's about a third, or half if you try really hard. (If you have a small child you can qualify for another program, called WIC, but what you get through it is more regulated.)
> If you can get a Section 8 (free housing) voucher you can essentially live without working
The phrase "if you can get" is doing a great deal of work here. The public housing voucher--of all types, not just section 8--waiting list for every populated county in Washington State is closed right now due to far more applicants than availability. In most of the country the waitlist is years long, if not decades. There is that notable story of a person who is now an Alderwoman for the City of Chicago[0] who was on the waiting list for 29 years and finally reached the point where she could apply for (but not yet receive) housing benefits.
The social safety net in the US is neither as strong nor as ubiquitous as you might suspect.
> get married after having children because government benefits are much stronger for single moms with multiple kids. It’s counter-productive.
The purpose of the system is what it does. The bureaucracy must ensure the continued existence of the dependent population it was built to serve. So it breaks up families and support networks in an effort to keep breeding more dependents.
Without getting into the rest of this- gambling is fairly normal all over the world, in most cultures, and in most other developed countries (Britain especially). The US, in spite of its libertarian reputation, is still weirdly Puritanical about some things (frankly I'd add prostitution in the mix there as well- regulated in some parts of Europe, basically tolerated in others).
Traditionally America had the 'you can only gamble in Vegas' model for decades, then it was forced by court decisions to extend that right to native casinos, then more recently it was forced by the Supreme Court to open it up to states who want it. It really has little to do with lobbying politicians, the US has been forced to relax gambling laws mostly by the courts
> It really has little to do with lobbying politicians
Casinos are very good at courting (or grooming) rich and powerful people. It would be very strange if they never applied that skill on politicians - or judges.
It baffles me that a lot of this website is positive of drug legalization, but gambling is suddenly completely morally awful and the government should not allow anyone to do it because they know what's good for you.
