>> 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.
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.