ProPublica had one of their reports work with gambling addition experts to see how DraftKings would respond to someone presenting signs of a gambling problem. It's a hell of a read, and makes it clear that this company is full of people with absolutely no ethics whatsoever.
People in companies that are a negative public good are by definition unethical. I'm not surprised by anything they do. The real problem is how we've let these companies infiltrate so much of our society so fast. I can't consume any ad supported media without getting some ad about them. This company really defines the phrase "money talks"
Prediction markets seemed like a possible exception to the rule that anything to do with betting is always a scourge on the commons, but those companies quickly realized sports gambling is the best way to rake in cash, so they all converge on it.
I am one of the very few people in the United States who actually does still earnestly believe prediction markets do in principle serve an immense social good that can't be provided in any other way: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq
Just, in practice, Polymarket and Kalshi are (unsurprisingl)y run by people who solely care about how much revenue they could ever possibly inhale.
And everything else about them is so unethical and so destructive to the commons I would support them being metaphorically razed to the ground.
Like, just the Kalshi and Polymarket Twitter accounts alone contribute more to disinformation (disinformation, not misinformation) than Alex Jones could ever dream of. And then all the accounts affiliated with them make it 1000x worse. And then they have so many other unbelievable scandals I'd have to write a wall of text to list them all. Tons of egregiously machiavellian, intelligence agency-tier tactics and operations.
The only prediction markets that seem to be mostly upside with minimal downside are the ones that do not accept real money.
An idealized prediction market could be a social good the same way a frictionless spherical cow is good for making my physics homework easier.
There is no way to remove the incentive for people with the ability to alter the events being bet on. Insider trading is generally considered a bad thing for the stock market because of the non symmetrical information for everyone trading but all of sudden in the past few years a cohort of people(rationalists) have found it virtuous
This falls under the umbrella of "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism". Everything you do supports somebody who's doing something bad. There's really no way to avoid it. Heck, it was even a plot point on The Good Place.
The issue is that our economic system is coercive. You need a job. Now this doesn't excuse you from doing any job but you also need to live.
Take the big tech companies. They're essentially military contractors now. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc are functionally no different to RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
But should you treat someone who works on Android the same as someone who works out on AI systems for military targeting? Probably not. Also, Palantir is fundamentally more evil than any of these tech companies. So it's tricky.
I do agree that online gambling as a whole is deeply unethical. There is no positive byproduct of this. Your salary is paid by people losing money, probably through addiction. And yes, you can say people have free will but you're still preying on and growing addiction.
Many people enjoy gambling, and relatively few have a "problem", so "negative public good" is doing a lot of work there. DraftKings may indeed by unethical, but that doesn't mean that all or even most others are.
In my state (Massachusetts), the number of people who call in to the state’s gambling problem hotline doubled after online sports books became legalized. That is, by definition, a negative effect on the public good. The net number of people seeking help for gambling problems increased by 100%.
It’s definitely bad that twice as many people have a gambling problem. However to assess the NET impact you also have to count how much value/fun/whatever the non-problem-gamblers are having, plus whatever tax revenues you get, increased economic activity from more attention on sports, etc.
Personally I think these companies suck. Just need more work to make a strong good faith argument about it.
I feel like a much larger fraction of the economy is predatory than is made out to be in these gambling discourses. Examples:
* FSA plans are designed to get you to gamble on how much medical expenses you will have; if you overestimate, you either lose the money or spend it on shit you otherwise wouldn't buy; if you underestimate, you pay taxes on stuff you shouldn't be paying taxes on. The healthy alternative would be: Cut the FSA, let people just tax deduct medical expenses at tax time, even small ones.
* Extended warranty plans are baiting you to pay for something you are statistically unlikely to need. The healthy alternative would be: Just service things past warranty and charge a much more reasoanable price for it.
* Insurances but co-insurances, deductibles, clauses: "We'll bait you into paying because you think we'll pay but we'll not actually pay because it says in the fine print"
* Trip protection: Asking you to gamble on the probability of a mishap, instead of just covering mishaps out of the box
To be a millionaire, maybe, but a $300/month scrather habit over 20 years, in a 401k that's just the SP 500 gets you a quarter million dollars, which isn't nothing to retire on, vs approximately $0 from scratchers.
Dude no offense but you must be vastly overestimating how many people can save $300 a month. We're talking about people buying couple lottery tickets a month.
That's the problem though. I know many people who can't save $300/month, but easily spend that much in consumables, scratchers, alcohol, drugs, etc. On the subject of gambling addiction, $300/month by someone who can't afford it absolutely happens. Go to a GA meeting sometime. They get their paycheck, gamble it away, and then don't have money for rent. Unrestricted gambling is the devil and will be the downfall of America. I'm not one for "shoulds", but there should be something like an accredited gambler law, where you're not allowed to gamble more than 1/3rd your paycheck except in certain circumstances.
> there should be something like an accredited gambler law, where you're not allowed to gamble more than 1/3rd your paycheck except in certain circumstances.
What would that look like? Would gamblers have to send copies of their pay stubs or bank statements to every casino or gas station they visit and every gambling app they use? I'd be happy if we focused on restricting the most harmful actions of the companies who profit from the people they turned into addicts. No more online sports betting. No more adverting for gambling. No more targeting children with gambling in video games that accept real money for anything. No more using AI or surveillance to detect and target addicts.
At least those often fund things like state education so, over time, the pool of victims is maybe lessened by the success of the program? Maybe?
(I am not defending state lotteries, but I do think there's some distinction to be made between "we actively exploit people to maximize our profits for our own sakes" and "we regulate the passive exploitation of people to supplement taxes in a regressive manner." Or something. I dunno, maybe somebody has more elaborate thoughts on this to share.)
In many places where gambling is banned, there is still gambling. And in places where it's legalized, it can (in theory) be effectively regulated (if there's political will, which is difficult to muster sometimes). And say what you will about lotteries, but it's far easier to blow your life savings at casinos and with sports betting than buying a bunch of lottery tickets.
See nature preserves that are funded by regulated big game hunting of the preserved nature.
It's a fun moral question. At what point do you give up trying to make someone/a population healthier and say "well if you're going to be this way, we might as well get some use out of you"?
"we regulate the passive exploitation of people to supplement taxes in a regressive manner."
I was convinced by this for a full 30 seconds before I realized there are millions of advertisements for the state lotteries. They aren't just regulating a market that will exist with or without the state, they are actively promoting and encouraging it
I've got plenty of negative things to say about state government lotteries, but the ones I'm familiar with are structured in less predatory ways. It's hard to spend thousands of dollars on lottery tickets, and impossible to do so in a way that won't feel obviously stupid, especially since you can't buy them on your phone.
The problem is, some humans seem to be consistently drawn towards products or services that fit that description.
In the 1980s, if you wanted to gamble in my city, you went to a gambling den operated by the Civella crime family. If you got caught in a police raid, your life was ruined. If you got behind on your debts, the mob might take it out of you, literally. These were known risks, but people did it anyways.
Then, in the 1990s, there was a change in the casino gaming laws. Casinos opened with harm reduction measures in place. You can absolutely destroy your finances for life in one, but there are ways out.
These apps need regulation like in-person gambling has. Whatever they currently have, it's not enough.
It isn't inherently addictive. Gambling addiction is significantly less common than alcohol addiction, and has no properties that make it inherently addictive to someone who is not predisposed towards that addiction (unlike drugs, for example, which are inherently addictive to all humans).
Some slot machines/casino games are designed to appeal to problem gamblers. DK and co, however, do not design these games, and state regulators do already control aspects of their design. For online operators, this doesn't represent most of their revenue and, I suspect, most would be quite happy not to provide these products.
I've seen this "it only affects problem gamblers" thing so much that I suspect it's an intentional strategy to shift blame that takes advantage of people's natural tendency to believe the just world fallacy (bad things only happen to bad people).
Gambling is absolutely inherently addictive as it's essentially perfectly paired with your brains reward system and hijacks it. There's literally dopamine cycle and tolerance happening. And when compounded by algorithms and notifications which are designed to amplify this even further I'm not sure how you can think it's not inherently addictive.
> unlike drugs, for example, which are inherently addictive to all humans
Define "drugs". Alcohol is a drug. Most users aren't addicts. So is tobacco. Most users are addicts. Cannabis? More like alcohol than tobacco in terms of addictiveness.
There may be some selection bias. Smoking tobacco is an unpleasant sensation. There's no reason to do it other than the addiction and the effects on your brain chemistry afterwards. Whereas many alcoholic drinks taste great in their own right and would be consumed even if they had no chemical effects.
I suspect gambling is like alcohol or cannabis. Engaging in it affects brain chemistry. For some people that's addictive. Most people are able to enjoy the activity without being hooked.
> But the little head rush you get starting the day with a coffee and a cigarette feels great.
That's the effect on brain chemistry I referred to.
Do you actually enjoy the smoke in your mouth, burning your eyes and lungs?
A cold beer on a hot day is refreshing just for its temperature alone. A fruity cocktail tastes good because sugar tastes good. What's enjoyable about the physical sensations produced by smoke?
I mean maybe we're arguing semantics, because the pleasure of eating sugar is possibly also an alteration of brain chemistry. But there is a difference.
As a former smoker (quit in 2009), I absolutely LOVED smoking. The whole thing. Opening the pack, packing it down, pulling out the cigarette, lighting it, the first drag filling my lungs, the fullness in my chest. The only thing I didn't like was that it made me smell bad. When I started a job where I was working close to people and the smell made me insecure, I decided to quit. I still miss the ritual.
Anyone who has quit smoking will tell you that the habit is the hardest part about quitting, not the physical addiction.
Gambling is proven to be addictive in the same way many other things are, and the harm of severe addiction is comparable to that of the worst drugs. It's very common for severe gambling addicts to lose everything they have, to lose everything they love, to never psychologically recover, to kill themselves.
The real number we want evaluate is "what percent of the revenue comes from people experiencing significant negative consequences from the product."
For alcohol that number is something like 2/3 revenue from the top 10% of drinkers, who drink an order of magnitude more than the decile below them. I doubt gambling is very different but if you have more info I'm happy to hear it.
IMHO one shouldn't expect a company to have any ethics to achieve a positive outcome for society. This needs to be baked into the rules (taxes, regulation, ...), so the ethical behavior becomes the rational behavior.
I think we should be able to expect a company to have ethics, just like we should be able to expect them to follow the laws, but we should also regulate them to ensure that they do and punish them meaningfully when they fail to.
You can't have rules in a society, that are against the moral feeling of sizable chunk of the population. That's just going to be a source for conflict. At some point you do need a population with a moral compass or you get nowhere as a ruler, especially in participatory ruling systems like a democracy.
companies are a fiction made out of people, they don't have anything, and regardless what the rules are I expect those people to behave ethically at any given time.
I'm not entirely sure when people started to have this idea that when they walk through a company door, as if this is some magical portal into the realm of amorality, give up their human responsibilities and faculties
> I expect those people to behave ethically at any given time.
A company is set up and incentivised to maximize a profit function, and that in turn incentivises to promote people which are not impeded by ethical considerations. The hierarchy furthermore ensures that people which would otherwise act ethical, don't, for fear of losing their job. This structure behaves ethical as long as you put ethics in the profit function.
"I'm not entirely sure when people started to have this idea that when they walk through a company door, as if this is some magical portal into the realm of amorality, give up their human responsibilities and faculties"
how can you became this naive ???? this is literally a company that get profit when you a lose
It started with Milton Friedman and the idea that The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits -- full stop, nothing else.
That frees one to think in a different way. No longer constrained by the convention of the common good, some folks, for instance, watched the movie "Wall Street", and took it not as the warning it so clearly was, but rather as in instruction manual. The wider populace believes this nonsense because it was passed on to us via Television, the Great Glowing Box of Truth that for the big chunk of the 20th century was the arbiter of reality.
Now we have people so confused by this bullshit and so in need of viewing themselves as "temporary poor" that they vote against their own interests on a regular basis.
Fortunately, the changing climate will wipe us out. :)
Would love to be a fly on the wall in whatever board room in the world has somebody saying “yes, we could increase profits by doing X, but that would be unethical so of course we won’t”
This happens at every gambling company in regulated markets like the US or Europe.
For comparison, there are offline casinos who use targeted adverts saying that they do not comply with regulators, and their adverts are designed in such a way as to appeal to people with gambling addiction (usually showing some kind of live play, which is banned in every regulated market afaik).
You can be sceptical of the motives of individuals but there are very strong corporate incentives from state regulators (in the US, particularly those with physical casinos).
> This happens at every gambling company in regulated markets like the US or Europe.
No something clearly different happens in regulated markets. There's a massive difference between "This would make us more money, but we won't do that because it's unethical" and "I wish we could get away with doing this unethical thing to make more money, but sadly current regulations make this one unprofitable for now. Lets increase our lobbying spend to try to fix that."
What usually happens is they talk about statistics rather than demographics. Eg “when doing x we’ve seen a 5% rise in engagement but a 50% rise in spend from those engaged”
Nobody is actually blind to the reality of the stats but this kind approach makes it both easier to dehumanise their actions as well as giving them plausible deniability when asked if they target specific demographics such as addicts.
Everything starts out permitted. Making things illegal requires action, and enforcing laws requires the application of nonconsensual violence - a direct action.
This goes back to the trolley problem. I'm part of society, and I'm not to blame in any way for this; I had nothing to do with it.
Meaning that, should they get the memo, they’d change their behaviour to that of a legitimate business? Not being combative here, just not sure I follow what you’re saying.
The libertarian in me says people should be allowed to make their own choices but I can't negate that gambling in poor is overall significantly negative for society. Before India banned this kind of gambling, I had a firend who worked as a data scientist for Dream11, an online fatasy cricket like gambling app. He was able to see a lot about the people playing. Oftentimes, the daily 'ticket size' was somewhere around 100-300INR (about $1-3), these were folks earning maybe 1.5 to twice that at the most. Their kids were often going hungry so their parents could play.
I mean what do we expect ???? "the house" is playing fair ????
we literally have mobile game that have "gacha" which is full blown gamble and we pretend that the actual "online casino" is to play moral, ethics or fairness ??
Not just mobile games. Roblox is basically an online child casino, powered by child laborers being compensated in Robux scrip. Fortnite isn't much better. We'd do a lot of good by regulating these games better too. The gambling addicts who got hooked with these games will move on to DraftKings when they're older. DraftKings knows this is their pipeline and has been investing in esports and video games like Call of Duty and establishing partnerships with Riot Games and Activision Blizzard.
What is your point? Bad thing happened in the past, we should continue to let bad thing happen?
Most people find current system of gambling from phone to be too much. Forcing people to physical location and limiting advertising can be good harm reduction without causing increase in crime.
"presenting signs"...there is no way for DK to tell that someone is addicted, which is the same error of logic in the original article.
There are multiple companies that will take your money and data and say they have found a way of identifying gamblers, afaik none of these products actually or can work.
What that article showed is: someone uses a product, they do not activate any features to use the product safely, and then they it is unsafe. DK have safety features integrated with governments already in the product.
Yes, it happens to every gambler who spends a lot of money. That is how VIP tiers are defined, based on how much you spend. There is no way for them (or anyone) to understand the customer's state of mind. Should it be illegal for retailers to offer customers discounts? Compulsive shopping is significantly more common than gambling addiction, do retailers target those customers?
If you never want to gamble, you tell the state regulator you never want to gamble and you will be unable to use any site.
You get made a VIP if you lose a lot of money, not if you have a gambling problem. In fact being made a VIP is basically the only way that the company can identify problem gamblers besides self-reports (because its the only time people from the company actually talk directly to the user).
My data science graduate program had a class that analyzed major data science success stories. The very first one covered how Caesar's Entertainment built models and ran experiments to identify their "most valuable customers", figure out how to predict when they were getting ready to leave the casino, and intervene with incentives and perks designed to get them to stay and keep gambling. And also how all of their competitors rushed to implement their own programs in response.
Look at it from the casino's perspective: their entire business model is centered on exploiting quirks of human psychology to separate people from their money. Expecting prosocial behavior from them is like expecting a squirrel to ignore your bird feeders.
The EFF isn't saying it's a surprise that companies are doing this. Nobody's surprised by that. They're drawing attention to it and saying they shouldn't be allowed to.
Gambling addiction is a brutal public health problem. As I understand it, gambling addicts have a very high incidence of suicidal ideation. When people work in these industries, their paychecks are directly coming from putting people into deep suffering.
That's a matter of opinion. There are those of us that believe that it is a gross violation of one's human rights to dictate how they're allowed to spend the money that they earned.
It's a side effect of liberty that people can choose to put themselves into deep suffering. I know people who do the same by blowing all of their money on designer clothes or expensive cars. Nobody is talking about regulating poor people wasting money on those things.
If you earn the money, you're entitled to piss it away. Them's the breaks.
at the same time, it's really not cool for billions of dollars to be spent on research of how to best influence susceptible people (who would otherwise not piss it all away,) to piss all their money away.
ban the predatory advertising and maximally addictive interfaces and most people will be happy. you can still piss your money away if you want to.
In general, there is a bigger philosophical question.
Do we treat humans as
1) having full agency, and thus full responsibility for their actions
2) having less than full agency, and then to what extent must society/governments implement control over things that humans can't control within themselves
Because generally, if you subscribe to 1, there is nothing immortal from taking money from a human that that wants to hand it over, provided that human well knows what is at stake. So as long as these websites aren't defrauding the customers with fake stats, there really is nothing wrong.
If you subscribe to 2, then thats a much riskier line to walk because that affects a lot of things, not just gambling.
You frame as if agency exists, then exploitive coercion doesn't exist.
We can respect the agency of folks to smoke or drink, while also criminalizing lying to entire populations about the known health effects of your products.
We can respect people as having agency, while also acknowledging that psy-ops like those run by Cambridge Analytica, or even normal psy-ops like mass market advertising, can influence groups of people through deceptive or manipulative ways in aggregate and cause massive harms.
We can respect personal agency while also acknowledging some folks have addiction problems, addictions problems be intentionally manufactured by products and platforms. There is a balance between allowing a poker game, and allowing the MGM Grand to plant a limo driver in a recovering addict's driveway.
We can respect agency while acknowledging those with large reach because of wealth can cause mass harm through media, influence and coercion if unregulated.
We can grant authorities to police and politicians without Qualified Immunity from consequences of their actions.
1. If someone knows all the information, but still chooses to make the wrong decision.
2. Someone is being told wrong or incomplete information, leading them to make the wrong decision
3. Someone is being forced by external means into making an wrong decision.
Two and three are already illegal, under fraud and coersion.
Im solely talking about 1. Because if you don't believe people have full agency in that regard, you have to prove to what extent can you determine what is deception. You can't just willy nilly say that something feels immoral, and therefore should be banned.
In my lifetime I've witnessed America accept new revenue sources by relaxing the moral code. First, it was allowing businesses to be open on Sunday. Then it was allowing liquor sales on Sunday. Then it was liquor ads on television. Then it was very controlled, state-run gambling (the lottery). Then it was casino gambling. Now it's online gambling and 'prediction markets'. Then it was recreational marijuana use. And so on. My point of reference is Missouri, where I grew up, but I think most states have followed a pretty similar path, all in search of new sources of revenue. I predict this trend will continue all the way to prostitution. Yes, that sounds crazy, but if you would've told me in the early-80s that Missouri would have casinos and legal weed, I would've considered that crazy.
I think legalizing cannabis was more about not jailing people for consuming a plant.
It's hard to respect a legal system that jails someone who wasn't hurting anyone. Repealing a law that criminalizes victimless behavior, especially when so many people already break it, paradoxically increases respect for other laws. It reinforces that the law serves a purpose: protecting people and promoting the general welfare.
There is no such thing as a victimless crime. Smoking marijuana has many many victims. I have personally seen enough people that smoked themselves stupid or into poverty that it hard for me to see it as a victimless crime. The issue was always that that laws and punishments were too lax.
> I have personally seen enough people that smoked themselves stupid or into poverty
We mostly don't criminalize self-harm. Is it really better for those people to be in prison, with violent criminals, and have a record, than be stupid or poor from too much smoking? Who does that help?
Drunk people get into accidents and fights and even commit murder. Cannabis users mostly stay home and snack. And yet we don't lock up people for buying a six-pack.
Cannabis isn't as chemically addictive as gambling.
Gambling is a victimless crime, if the gambler is a single person with no dependents. Most of the harms are when someone gambles away the family home or their kids' college funds.
Gambling is worse than cannabis. There's no limit, other than your credit, to how much money you can lose gambling. That's not true for cannabis. You can only consume so much and even grow it for free if you need to.
I support legalizing gambling too. Making all gambling illegal drives it underground and allows criminals to profit from it.
But I equally strongly oppose online gambling or gambling advertising (while we're on the subject, I think alcohol advertising shouldn't exist either). You can't smoke or drink anywhere, anytime. Why should gambling be any different? Go to an IRL casino or betting shop or racetrack and gamble. Regulate the hours and locations of these establishments.
Gambling, alcohol, and cannabis aren't good for you. So why allow them to be marketed to people? If they want to gamble (or drink or smoke) they'll find out about it and do it. No need to deliberately try to get people to do it.
You know prositution is already legal in certain counties in Nevada, and it's been that way since '71?
The list is far longer than you've mentioned.
Here's a list of things you're allowed to profit on either as an investor or as a participant that are quite wild: Fighting with gloves (more lethal than bare-knuckle), bare-knuckle fights, kids in contact sports (even combat sports), throwing away perfectly good food in order to lower taxable income, not planting a crop specifically because it wouldn't make enough profit, gig-economy not paying living wages, a minimum wage below living wage, predatory lending, algorithmic social media that swings elections, targetted advertisement psyops, marketing to children, cosmetic surgery in general but especially for children, forced conversion 'therapy', experimental life saving treatments gate-kept by money, planned obsolescence, plastic packaging...
In combat sports, we're really not too far removed from the collisuem, just that it's "not meant to be to the death" even though it does often result in death or lifelong conditions. The fighters get paid, the organizers get paid, the arena gets paid, the advertisers get paid...All in the name of watching someone not quite kill someone.
Hell, we've even still got slavery tucked neatly away behind "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.", but we know that many sitting in prison are demonstrably innocent. The prison is allowed to require that every inmate works. You're allowed to run an organization that profits from these slaves. You are not legally required to pay in some states.
Capital constantly needs new frontiers to exploit, and therefore must remove moral and social obstacles that stand in its way. Pseudo-prostitution has already been made widespread via platforms like OnlyFans, it's only a matter of time before in-the-flesh prostitution follows, as you said.
It's curious to me that so many progressives or soi-disant leftists are in favor of dissolving these types of moral and social traditions while being fervently anti-capitalist. It seems that they (meaning the subset who are always looking for new fenceposts to tear down) are in fact the shock troops of Capital.
Sorry but Sunday blue laws are religious discrimination. It’s just a day and businesses shouldn’t be restricted by a single religious sect. Gambling and substance abuse are actual public health issues.
I like how you have to be an accredited investor to get involved with riskier investment instruments but you can be a total moron with no money and lose whatever you have left betting on sports and prediction markets.
Btw it’s not just those two, add iGaming into the mix which is cell phone gambling glammed up in Candy Crush form. Leeches, all of them.
I believe there are "casino games" on Apple and Android stores that are similar to actual gambling, you just buy "tokens" that can never be redeemed for cash.
Proof if proof needed of the complete pointlessness of casino gambling. Some people will still do it even when they know they can't win anything.
"In the United States, to be considered an accredited investor, a natural person must have a net worth of at least $1,000,000, excluding the value of one's primary residence, or have income at least $200,000 each year for the last two years (or $300,000 combined income if married) and have the expectation to make the same amount this year, or must otherwise be a holder of a specific license in good standing."
Of course you can still lie but legally there is a line.
The standard may be higher, but the implementation is "This is what it means to be accredited: are you accredited? By the way if you say no, I can't sell you the thing I've been trying to convince you to buy."
If you had to take and pass a test, that might filter out more people; although I'm sure the seller would help you pass the test, so maybe not.
its purpose is simple. if you lose the money of sufficiently powerful people, as a middleman, the standard exposes you one more kind of legal jeopardy.
Man, who would be so stupid to get addicted to gambling?
Oooh, Claude is giving me a free spi... reset until October 22? Maybe I will stay on their Max plan. My tokens aren't getting me as far as previously, maybe I should buy another plan? Man, I just got this one new startup idea, I know this will be the one where investors will love me. I can feel it. C'mon Opus, just one more session... come ooon...
Somebody said (I think it was FrostPrime) roughly: Gambling is genuinely the scariest drug, I actually think it's worse than cocaine and it's just right there on your phone.
I think that really framed the issue well to me. Imagine having an addiction problem and having to carry the problem substance around with you 24/7.
Every personality has something, it seems, that it tends to get addicted to if given the chance. Gambling has never been that to me. I get bored with most of the games and upset at losing money—even if I net win, I’m irritated about the incremental losses.
On the other hand, I have to manually keep track of how many days in a month I drink because if I don’t I’ll happily have half a bottle of wine every evening, and I think I know where that leads. (When I lose money in a casino I almost always translate that into a nice dinner. Which I will, invariably, enjoy far more than winning imaginary numbers.)
> and upset at losing money—even if I net win, I’m irritated about the incremental losses.
While you don't appear to be susceptible, it is notable that this mindset is not something that makes you less likely to develop a gambling problem. It's actually part of how they drive addiction. A customer who is annoyed at every loss is often a customer who will chase their losses with more/bigger bets, trying to get the winning high back.
> customer who is annoyed at every loss is often a customer who will chase their losses with more/bigger bets
That makes sense. When I lose a bit the boredom accelerates and I just want to leave. I’ve “spent” the money on an experience and it was boring.
The only exception to this is card games. But I don’t like those at casinos or on my phone. And I’d be happier playing a board game with most of the folks I play poker with.
I don't think there is nearly enough attention on the pipeline that has been created for children to grow into good little gamblers. All major sports games have absolute borderline gambling within their game in the form of those fantasy style Card games. Pair that with watching any live broadcast of a major sport and the gross ads for all these major sports better companies, with the ad reads during the game.
Haven't followed all that closely for some other games, but it very much seems like the model for NBA2k is to release a new game with some minor patches each year, charge 70$, then spend the majority of that year crafting patches for the card game to keep whales interested in constantly spending on new packs(which are promptly devalued on the next release, and straight up killing the prior year's game's online service, makes them entirely worthless the next year).
It’s really disturbing to me because sports are one category of entertainment that is supposed to be family friendly and accessible to kids. They look up to pro athletes as heroes and all the gambling ads are directly being shown to children. It shouldn’t be legal to advertise age restricted products and services to kids, even if they’re not the “intended” target. They’re still being groomed to accept gambling as cool and normal. Gambling, alcohol, all those ads should be subject to the same safe harbor restrictions as sexual content. Ban the ads from stadiums and jerseys too.
I don't watch sports much, but the last times I did they filled the screen with ads for gambling in the middle of the games while they were being played
beyond that, every sports podcast actively encourages gambling. hosts lightheartedly joke about their bad beats like its a pratfall. while entertaining as a non-gambling outsider, i think its a colloquial rationalization of life-ruining behavior
“Gambling company leans into its target demographic”
I worked with a state lottery that did similar things. Their target demographic was the “every day players” that would compulsively buy at the gas station.
I quit that job because it seems to be morally wrong.
Betting apps are just this taken to the extreme, I feel for people with this addiction but it’s not going away anytime soon.
I worked with a state lottery as well. They had very clear training for the retailers they worked with to identify and stop problem gambling. There was space reserved in ever ad and on every retailer counter for stop gambling assistance. The few meetings I attended all began with what they had done to reduce problem gambling.
I worked with a heroin distributor as well. They had very clear training for the dealers they worked with to identify and stop problem heroin use. There was space reserved in every text and on every dealer’s coffee table for stop heroin assistance.
Not equating your work for a lottery with dealing heroin, I’m just pointing out that to say you don’t want people addicted to heroin while still selling heroin isn’t sufficient, and I think the same applies to lotteries. If they acknowledge the problem stop even offering it as a product.
The difference is that the regulator controls your licence to operate. So if you do something that fails to meet the guidelines they create for responsible gaming then they take away your licence.
Acknowledging the problem doesn't make it go away: you must be a big war on drugs guy? right?
Fair point, and I’ll concede that regulation is an attractive concept here. But in the gambling case specifically it seems that regulation has resulted in an explosion in gambling. The hotlines and responsible gaming stuff appears totally ineffectual and geared more towards the operators being able to say “we care and are doing something” when what they’re actually doing is using AI to prey on people. At least with drug decriminalization or legalization there are genuine attempts at harm reduction.
It's hard for me to view that as anything other than mostly for show.
The retailers still have every incentive to sell as many lottery tickets as people will buy, because that's how they make a sizable portion of their money.
And the gambling addiction hotlines are too little too late. I've known people who struggled with gambling. They never admitted they had a problem until they had bottomed out. At that point I doubt the lotteries and casinos particularly care because that well's already run dry, anyway.
If the gaming industry really wanted to put their money where their mouth is on this one, they'd figure out ways to prevent people from getting into that situation in the first place. Putting limits on how much money anyone person can lose, even if only at a single establishment, is one idea that wouldn't even be hard to implement. But of course we won't see that because, unlike gambling addiction hotlines, that runs the risk of reducing their profits.
> Betting apps are just this taken to the extreme, I feel for people with this addiction but it’s not going away anytime soon.
Why? This wasn't a thing that existed 10-15 years ago, this isn't some long-standing institution. We could ban online betting apps today if we wanted to.
When widespread sports gambling was illegal before, there were not rich and powerful people whose ability to maintain and grow their wealth and power was tied to keeping sports gambling legal.
Now those rich and powerful people exist, and they will use their wealth and power to keep it legal. It is not easy to put the genie back into the bottle.
> I worked with a state lottery that did similar things. Their target demographic was the “every day players”
That's wild. Wasn't the whole point of having a state lottery to put the state in a better position to be able to discourage people from becoming addicted? The very idea of a "target demographic" seems contrary to that goal; the "target" should be to have nobody buying tickets.
Ban state lotteries while we're banning DraftKings IMO. I find I cannot have a productive conversation with anyone who thinks the odds of winning the lottery are higher than winning in the stock market buying total market funds.
Ah... Got it... The same galaxy brains that think p(foom) has a materially greater value than an epsilon minimally >0 to avoid divide by zero errors believe in lottery tickets. Got it. Explains a lot, thanks...
Your $1 lottery coupon has extremely low chances of winning a million dollars, but they aren't zero. No one will sell you any stocks for $1, but even if they did what is a chance of a random $1 stock increasing in value one million times?
You have been able to buy mutual funds in dollar increments for like forever, with the significant caveat that there's often a minimum purchase amount, but once you hold that you can add in single dollars if you want +/- they only deal in a certain number of decimals.
Fractional share trading of stocks and ETFs happens at a lot of brokers for the past several years, too. Do they really want you to buy $1 of BRK.A? probably not, but you probably can.
Also, there's like penny stocks. :P
But yeah, there's no mechanism for that $1 to turn into millions of dollars within a few days. It can happen with a very well timed purchase, many decades, and some inflation, but that's not very exciting.
Expected return on a total market fund is 9 to 10% annually.
Expected return on a lottery ticket is 30 to 50 cents on the dollar.
Just like AI p(Doom) in the next decade is approximately zero, but we all have to pretend to it's between 1 and 10% so American frontier labs can implement regulatory capture.
So if what you're saying is you are willing to bet $1 if I give you a 1 in 1 billion chance of winning $1M, I will take that bet. And I will take that bet as many times as you'd like.
But your best chance of winning $1M? Start with $10M.
Chronic losers, says the article. Not whales. That's unexpected. I'd thought that those big gambling sites were parimutuel, where the counterparty is other bettors and the site just takes a cut. Horse racing tracks and prediction markets work that way.
The house can't lose, and doesn't care who wins. The odds keep changing as bets come in and the odds rebalance.
Apparently that's not true for sports betting.
A 2024 study out of Connecticut found that 1.8% of problem gamblers in the state accounted for 51% of sports betting revenue.[1]
I frequently get DraftKings ad on YouTube featuring Kevin Hart and Nick Jonas, they're pushing the information that it is now legal in every state.
I also get loads Polymarket and Kalshi ads. Polymarket seems to have invested tons into featuring mega celebs like LeBron in one of their ads. Other ads feature influencers showing off how to trade and such. More obnoxious part is that these companies pay influencers to talk about trading and winning live on streams- without disclosing they're paying those influencers.
Polymarket even set up fake website where influencers showed they were winning hundreds of thousands of dollars. You wouldn't find those bets on the real Polymarket website.
why are we lumping marijuana and gambling together?
Marijuana is not zero harm, but guess what: Making it illegal is ALSO not zero harm. The drug war is an abject failure, US consumers have driven Mexico into a failed state with roving gangs of narcos who murder crowds of people with impunity.
"Studies say..." OK. Actually study weed then. Actually do clinical trials and apply science and tell us the actual results. Actually doing that has been prevented because it is a scheduled drug federally. So all we have is folk wisdom and half-baked one-off studies. "Linked to" has no scientific value, it is a term the news uses to scare people.
I think people should be informed and be allowed to make their own choices, as opposed to creating a huge and tyrannical law enforcement agency that will ruin a kids life for carrying a plant around.
Always funny how conservatives are the party of freedom, unless it's something they don't like.
Some betting company made a partnership with my area's public bus system to put their ads on the side of the bus. There is no recourse for this, it seems, and this explosion of gambling ads is only going to get worse.
Except online poker (here in the states)! Gotta keep that one prohibited. Now, betting on every freethrow Joe BBall takes in a game ... we're morally good there. It's those pesky immoral cards we have a problem with!
Individual liberty is a dangerous thing, by design.
Existence isn't safe, and it's not up to the state to try to make it safe for you. It's our responsibility as a society to ensure that you have maximum liberty, insofar as it does not directly harm other people.
You are entirely free (or, should be) to harm yourself, or to make decisions that put yourself in danger.
I used to work in adtech and someone in sales told me that DraftKings and FanDuel did not like being referred to as gambling companies. They always wanted to convince people that it wasn't gambling, even though it's so obvious that's what it is.
I wish gambling was outlawed entirely. Let bookies run it in some crack dens, I don't care about that, but every single gambling ad I see in the open is infuriating for me like no other ads. It's been seeping into sports commentary and even news on TV, "oh I don't think we have a full picture of the situation Kalshi has it at 60%", die in a fire. It's comparable to scammers preying on grandma.
No, I don't care about the "but liberty!" arguments.
What do you expect? They thrive on addicts. No different than NYSE:META, and NYSE:RDDT, and NYSE:BUD and NYSE:TAP and NYSE:(fill in whatever proven-to-be-addicting product you want)
And this is the sort of use of AI that ought to be regulated. But it's not as exciting as an AI going foom and cleansing the planet of the scientifically illiterate so it doesn't get traction.
Why regulate the AI bit instead of the behavior itself? If you don’t want people to exploit addiction, then outlaw that, rather than saying you just can’t use AI to exploit addictions.
I worked in a large and well known online casino as a technical account manager. I promise you, for all the "responsible gaming" stuff they have written everywhere, if a big account decides to stop playing (let's say they just want a break from gambling), their personal am will be arranging free trips and vip treatment to keep them on the tables. I have seen it happen and it disgusted me. I no longer work for such companies
meanwhile, free-to-play gaming's business model is to speedrun through the population via ads to find the most mentally unwell or underdeveloped people with access to credit cards or at least grandmothers who will buy them gift cards
This should come as no surprise to anybody. They have every incentive to exploit those who can't resist their offering. Gambling is the new tobacco industry.
They'll always do this. It's not even "AI" it's just a boring old ML model.
Money Stuff did a great bit on this a few days ago. There's 2 functions inside DraftKings:
- Fin the most lucrative customers, to keep engaging them.
- Finds addicted gamblers, to get them help to quit gambling.
These are the same people.
Sure, yeah, there's a nice little story about gambling within your means, blah blah. But if you're optimizing your gambling app, you're going to find and create problematic gambling as the core objective.
AI, ML, whatever. It's a gambling company. It targets gamblers. It probably shouldn't exist.
Michael Lewis did a similar series for one of the seasons of his podcast.
What amazed me was that Chris Christie (then governor of NJ) used state money to fund SIX consecutive lawsuits trying to get online gambling legalized in New Jersey.
Online dating apps do the same exact thing. When you try to disengage they spam you with notifications and emails saying a bunch of people want to talk to you.
You actually login or god forbid pay for a subscription, all of your matches are disabled bot accounts. I actually have a theory that daiting apps are responsible for a significant portion if not most of those bots.
I’m actually more willing to work on a gambling or prediction product vs a dating app.
We need to see the kind of regulation of these apps and websites that you see with state gambling control boards. If you need to present ID to walk onto a casino floor, you should need one to log onto these services. Each time. You should be able to ban yourself at the device account level. The odds need to be regulated.
Another perfect example of why we don't need new laws, we "simply" need to enforce them. Supposedly, Dark Patterns are illegal. If the corporation had to tell you how they use your data, would you let them?
DraftKings: Hi we're going to give you extra incentives!
User: Hmm, sounds like I might like that. How do I get them?
DraftKings: You have to lose constantly! And then when you start winning, we take them away! You like that, don't you?
User: No.
Dark Pattern. No new rules needed. "Just" enforcement.
I would be surprised if this was not already systemic and endemic across the retail space preying on people who have compulsive spending, gambling issues.
Really this is the entire economy now, giant companies that have billions invested in mass surveillance and heavily min-maxed dark patterns targeting the wallet of the average unsuspecting consumer. Nonsense subscriptions that are impossible to cancel, replacing ownership with "license", customized pricing, endless advertising, zero customer service, shrinkwrap licenses that change daily, etc etc etc.
If you are vetting a romantic partner or a business partner, I would strongly urge you to check their phone. If they have DraftKings or FanDuel installed... run. Some might even say they lose some but it's for entertainment. I'd still trust them less than a social heroin user.
You will find a lot of people who will tell you they win at these things. They don't. How do I know this? Because if you win consistently, they kick you off. You're bad for business because the pigeons need to win occasionally to keep playing (and losing).
Gambling (and I include Kalshi and Polymarket here) shouldn't be this accessible. Back when you had to go to a casino, it was still bad but that barrier prevented a lot of harm. Being able to gamble away your future and your family's future from the comfort of your phone simply shouldn't be allowed.
I know people who place bets fairly regularly (weekly during their favorite sports seasons) and they have been making profits yearly. You're not going to get banned for making hundreds of dollars in profit. I'm not saying these guys are making good decisions or should even keep doing it, but I have seen their activity statements.
you absolutely can get banned for making hundreds in profits! Has happened to several people I know (maybe the flag for them was having a v obvious pattern).
What I've learned in life is how much people lie. They may not intentionally lie. They may just be wrong.
As an example, if anybody tells you their commute to work is 25 minutes, it's more likely 45 minutes. "It takes me 10 minutes to get to X" really means 20. I don't know what it is but people just don't get this right.
It's way worse when it comes to money. "My income is $X" literally means "My income is 0.3X to 0.7X". I need to see employment contracts and W2s before I believe you what you say about your salary. People will even lie anonymously (eg on surveys). It's like they need to believe it themselves.
So when you say you have friends who net win hundreds of dollars, unless you've seen P&Ls, I don't believe them. And I'm sure these sites don't make it easy to figure out your total P&L because then you might stop. People will remember and boast about their wins and downplay or just plain forget their losses. They'll minimize losses and exaggerate wins. It's just human nature.
Ever notice how no gambler says they consistently lose? Everyone is somehow a winner? Isn't that sus?
>You will find a lot of people who will tell you they win at these things. They don't. How do I know this? Because if you win consistently, they kick you off.
This is only true in some cases and entirely depends on your form of gambling. Draftkings and Fanduel both run "daily fantasy" and sportbooks, and they are quite different. If you win consistently enough on the sportsbook, then you are taking money from the house, and they will ban you. The "daily fantasy" gambling on the other hand, works on a paramutual basis where they take their profits off the top. For example they will take 20% of the total prize pool regardless of who ends up winning or losing. Much like the track when it comes to horse racing, they don't care who wins or loses because they are getting the same % either way, and the more volume there is the more money they make.
Why wouldn't they? We have no consumer protections so this type of thing is happening everywhere all the time on every level of society.
People with personality disorders, depression, anxiety, etc. all algorithmically being plied for attention. It's disgusting and nobody is doing anything about it, which will eventually erode buy-in in the system until someone is willing to let it all go without an adversary even firing a shot.
https://www.propublica.org/article/draftkings-sports-gamblin...
You have many adtech online dossiers that are basically a virtual you, that can be poked, prodded and studied for interests and behaviors.
for a very minimal look, maybe check out amazon "about you":
https://www.amazon.com/slc/hub?useAiMode=1
I am one of the very few people in the United States who actually does still earnestly believe prediction markets do in principle serve an immense social good that can't be provided in any other way: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq
Just, in practice, Polymarket and Kalshi are (unsurprisingl)y run by people who solely care about how much revenue they could ever possibly inhale.
And everything else about them is so unethical and so destructive to the commons I would support them being metaphorically razed to the ground.
Like, just the Kalshi and Polymarket Twitter accounts alone contribute more to disinformation (disinformation, not misinformation) than Alex Jones could ever dream of. And then all the accounts affiliated with them make it 1000x worse. And then they have so many other unbelievable scandals I'd have to write a wall of text to list them all. Tons of egregiously machiavellian, intelligence agency-tier tactics and operations.
The only prediction markets that seem to be mostly upside with minimal downside are the ones that do not accept real money.
There is no way to remove the incentive for people with the ability to alter the events being bet on. Insider trading is generally considered a bad thing for the stock market because of the non symmetrical information for everyone trading but all of sudden in the past few years a cohort of people(rationalists) have found it virtuous
The issue is that our economic system is coercive. You need a job. Now this doesn't excuse you from doing any job but you also need to live.
Take the big tech companies. They're essentially military contractors now. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc are functionally no different to RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
But should you treat someone who works on Android the same as someone who works out on AI systems for military targeting? Probably not. Also, Palantir is fundamentally more evil than any of these tech companies. So it's tricky.
I do agree that online gambling as a whole is deeply unethical. There is no positive byproduct of this. Your salary is paid by people losing money, probably through addiction. And yes, you can say people have free will but you're still preying on and growing addiction.
That's hardly the problem of the economic system, and more of a underlying problem with the the universe (ie. entropy and all).
Personally I think these companies suck. Just need more work to make a strong good faith argument about it.
I believe this applies to any company which sells an inherently harmful, predatory, and addictive product or service
That leads us to BJ Fogg's Persuasive Design Lab at Stanford and the addictive software design.
Tobacco industry owners figured out their time's out and bought food stock and put their addiction department to design food to be addictive.
Where should we head next?
* FSA plans are designed to get you to gamble on how much medical expenses you will have; if you overestimate, you either lose the money or spend it on shit you otherwise wouldn't buy; if you underestimate, you pay taxes on stuff you shouldn't be paying taxes on. The healthy alternative would be: Cut the FSA, let people just tax deduct medical expenses at tax time, even small ones.
* Extended warranty plans are baiting you to pay for something you are statistically unlikely to need. The healthy alternative would be: Just service things past warranty and charge a much more reasoanable price for it.
* Insurances but co-insurances, deductibles, clauses: "We'll bait you into paying because you think we'll pay but we'll not actually pay because it says in the fine print"
* Trip protection: Asking you to gamble on the probability of a mishap, instead of just covering mishaps out of the box
Used to work at 7-Eleven and we would have people come in and out for hours on end pouring money into scratch tickets.
State lotteries are just a regressive tax targeting the poor.
As bad as the odds are, the lottery is still the best chance most players will ever have to be millionaires
What would that look like? Would gamblers have to send copies of their pay stubs or bank statements to every casino or gas station they visit and every gambling app they use? I'd be happy if we focused on restricting the most harmful actions of the companies who profit from the people they turned into addicts. No more online sports betting. No more adverting for gambling. No more targeting children with gambling in video games that accept real money for anything. No more using AI or surveillance to detect and target addicts.
(I am not defending state lotteries, but I do think there's some distinction to be made between "we actively exploit people to maximize our profits for our own sakes" and "we regulate the passive exploitation of people to supplement taxes in a regressive manner." Or something. I dunno, maybe somebody has more elaborate thoughts on this to share.)
It's a fun moral question. At what point do you give up trying to make someone/a population healthier and say "well if you're going to be this way, we might as well get some use out of you"?
(To me, it seems) The same people who screamed to legalize weed a few years ago are vehemently against alcohol and gambling.
I was convinced by this for a full 30 seconds before I realized there are millions of advertisements for the state lotteries. They aren't just regulating a market that will exist with or without the state, they are actively promoting and encouraging it
You have some numbers to check.
(“Elaborate thoughts” aren’t needed here - are more people spending less on the lottery? where does each state spend the money?)
Yet
In the 1980s, if you wanted to gamble in my city, you went to a gambling den operated by the Civella crime family. If you got caught in a police raid, your life was ruined. If you got behind on your debts, the mob might take it out of you, literally. These were known risks, but people did it anyways.
Then, in the 1990s, there was a change in the casino gaming laws. Casinos opened with harm reduction measures in place. You can absolutely destroy your finances for life in one, but there are ways out.
These apps need regulation like in-person gambling has. Whatever they currently have, it's not enough.
Some slot machines/casino games are designed to appeal to problem gamblers. DK and co, however, do not design these games, and state regulators do already control aspects of their design. For online operators, this doesn't represent most of their revenue and, I suspect, most would be quite happy not to provide these products.
Define "drugs". Alcohol is a drug. Most users aren't addicts. So is tobacco. Most users are addicts. Cannabis? More like alcohol than tobacco in terms of addictiveness.
There may be some selection bias. Smoking tobacco is an unpleasant sensation. There's no reason to do it other than the addiction and the effects on your brain chemistry afterwards. Whereas many alcoholic drinks taste great in their own right and would be consumed even if they had no chemical effects.
I suspect gambling is like alcohol or cannabis. Engaging in it affects brain chemistry. For some people that's addictive. Most people are able to enjoy the activity without being hooked.
I disagree but maybe I’m just addicted.
It's terrible for your health, it's "burning money", it literally makes you stink, it makes you winded walking up stairs, and is generally terrible.
But the little head rush you get starting the day with a coffee and a cigarette feels great.
That's the effect on brain chemistry I referred to.
Do you actually enjoy the smoke in your mouth, burning your eyes and lungs?
A cold beer on a hot day is refreshing just for its temperature alone. A fruity cocktail tastes good because sugar tastes good. What's enjoyable about the physical sensations produced by smoke?
I mean maybe we're arguing semantics, because the pleasure of eating sugar is possibly also an alteration of brain chemistry. But there is a difference.
Anyone who has quit smoking will tell you that the habit is the hardest part about quitting, not the physical addiction.
For alcohol that number is something like 2/3 revenue from the top 10% of drinkers, who drink an order of magnitude more than the decile below them. I doubt gambling is very different but if you have more info I'm happy to hear it.
Fully agree, that's what I mean.
I'm not entirely sure when people started to have this idea that when they walk through a company door, as if this is some magical portal into the realm of amorality, give up their human responsibilities and faculties
A company is set up and incentivised to maximize a profit function, and that in turn incentivises to promote people which are not impeded by ethical considerations. The hierarchy furthermore ensures that people which would otherwise act ethical, don't, for fear of losing their job. This structure behaves ethical as long as you put ethics in the profit function.
how can you became this naive ???? this is literally a company that get profit when you a lose
for their ethics, its inline with company mission
That frees one to think in a different way. No longer constrained by the convention of the common good, some folks, for instance, watched the movie "Wall Street", and took it not as the warning it so clearly was, but rather as in instruction manual. The wider populace believes this nonsense because it was passed on to us via Television, the Great Glowing Box of Truth that for the big chunk of the 20th century was the arbiter of reality.
Now we have people so confused by this bullshit and so in need of viewing themselves as "temporary poor" that they vote against their own interests on a regular basis.
Fortunately, the changing climate will wipe us out. :)
For comparison, there are offline casinos who use targeted adverts saying that they do not comply with regulators, and their adverts are designed in such a way as to appeal to people with gambling addiction (usually showing some kind of live play, which is banned in every regulated market afaik).
You can be sceptical of the motives of individuals but there are very strong corporate incentives from state regulators (in the US, particularly those with physical casinos).
No something clearly different happens in regulated markets. There's a massive difference between "This would make us more money, but we won't do that because it's unethical" and "I wish we could get away with doing this unethical thing to make more money, but sadly current regulations make this one unprofitable for now. Lets increase our lobbying spend to try to fix that."
Nobody is actually blind to the reality of the stats but this kind approach makes it both easier to dehumanise their actions as well as giving them plausible deniability when asked if they target specific demographics such as addicts.
This goes back to the trolley problem. I'm part of society, and I'm not to blame in any way for this; I had nothing to do with it.
If you are in the US, you are to blame for the US gambling situation. We make the rules as a society.
They seem to have not gotten the memo that they're a legitimate business now.
I mean what do we expect ???? "the house" is playing fair ????
we literally have mobile game that have "gacha" which is full blown gamble and we pretend that the actual "online casino" is to play moral, ethics or fairness ??
we literally past that point ages ago
Most people find current system of gambling from phone to be too much. Forcing people to physical location and limiting advertising can be good harm reduction without causing increase in crime.
There are multiple companies that will take your money and data and say they have found a way of identifying gamblers, afaik none of these products actually or can work.
What that article showed is: someone uses a product, they do not activate any features to use the product safely, and then they it is unsafe. DK have safety features integrated with governments already in the product.
Yes, it happens to every gambler who spends a lot of money. That is how VIP tiers are defined, based on how much you spend. There is no way for them (or anyone) to understand the customer's state of mind. Should it be illegal for retailers to offer customers discounts? Compulsive shopping is significantly more common than gambling addiction, do retailers target those customers?
If you never want to gamble, you tell the state regulator you never want to gamble and you will be unable to use any site.
My data science graduate program had a class that analyzed major data science success stories. The very first one covered how Caesar's Entertainment built models and ran experiments to identify their "most valuable customers", figure out how to predict when they were getting ready to leave the casino, and intervene with incentives and perks designed to get them to stay and keep gambling. And also how all of their competitors rushed to implement their own programs in response.
Look at it from the casino's perspective: their entire business model is centered on exploiting quirks of human psychology to separate people from their money. Expecting prosocial behavior from them is like expecting a squirrel to ignore your bird feeders.
It's a side effect of liberty that people can choose to put themselves into deep suffering. I know people who do the same by blowing all of their money on designer clothes or expensive cars. Nobody is talking about regulating poor people wasting money on those things.
If you earn the money, you're entitled to piss it away. Them's the breaks.
Intellectually honest answers only
at the same time, it's really not cool for billions of dollars to be spent on research of how to best influence susceptible people (who would otherwise not piss it all away,) to piss all their money away.
ban the predatory advertising and maximally addictive interfaces and most people will be happy. you can still piss your money away if you want to.
Do we treat humans as
1) having full agency, and thus full responsibility for their actions
2) having less than full agency, and then to what extent must society/governments implement control over things that humans can't control within themselves
Because generally, if you subscribe to 1, there is nothing immortal from taking money from a human that that wants to hand it over, provided that human well knows what is at stake. So as long as these websites aren't defrauding the customers with fake stats, there really is nothing wrong.
If you subscribe to 2, then thats a much riskier line to walk because that affects a lot of things, not just gambling.
This is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.
You frame as if agency exists, then exploitive coercion doesn't exist.
We can respect the agency of folks to smoke or drink, while also criminalizing lying to entire populations about the known health effects of your products.
We can respect people as having agency, while also acknowledging that psy-ops like those run by Cambridge Analytica, or even normal psy-ops like mass market advertising, can influence groups of people through deceptive or manipulative ways in aggregate and cause massive harms.
We can respect personal agency while also acknowledging some folks have addiction problems, addictions problems be intentionally manufactured by products and platforms. There is a balance between allowing a poker game, and allowing the MGM Grand to plant a limo driver in a recovering addict's driveway.
We can respect agency while acknowledging those with large reach because of wealth can cause mass harm through media, influence and coercion if unregulated.
We can grant authorities to police and politicians without Qualified Immunity from consequences of their actions.
1. If someone knows all the information, but still chooses to make the wrong decision.
2. Someone is being told wrong or incomplete information, leading them to make the wrong decision
3. Someone is being forced by external means into making an wrong decision.
Two and three are already illegal, under fraud and coersion.
Im solely talking about 1. Because if you don't believe people have full agency in that regard, you have to prove to what extent can you determine what is deception. You can't just willy nilly say that something feels immoral, and therefore should be banned.
It's hard to respect a legal system that jails someone who wasn't hurting anyone. Repealing a law that criminalizes victimless behavior, especially when so many people already break it, paradoxically increases respect for other laws. It reinforces that the law serves a purpose: protecting people and promoting the general welfare.
We mostly don't criminalize self-harm. Is it really better for those people to be in prison, with violent criminals, and have a record, than be stupid or poor from too much smoking? Who does that help?
Drunk people get into accidents and fights and even commit murder. Cannabis users mostly stay home and snack. And yet we don't lock up people for buying a six-pack.
Gambling is a victimless crime, if the gambler is a single person with no dependents. Most of the harms are when someone gambles away the family home or their kids' college funds.
Gambling is worse than cannabis. There's no limit, other than your credit, to how much money you can lose gambling. That's not true for cannabis. You can only consume so much and even grow it for free if you need to.
I support legalizing gambling too. Making all gambling illegal drives it underground and allows criminals to profit from it.
But I equally strongly oppose online gambling or gambling advertising (while we're on the subject, I think alcohol advertising shouldn't exist either). You can't smoke or drink anywhere, anytime. Why should gambling be any different? Go to an IRL casino or betting shop or racetrack and gamble. Regulate the hours and locations of these establishments.
Gambling, alcohol, and cannabis aren't good for you. So why allow them to be marketed to people? If they want to gamble (or drink or smoke) they'll find out about it and do it. No need to deliberately try to get people to do it.
The list is far longer than you've mentioned.
Here's a list of things you're allowed to profit on either as an investor or as a participant that are quite wild: Fighting with gloves (more lethal than bare-knuckle), bare-knuckle fights, kids in contact sports (even combat sports), throwing away perfectly good food in order to lower taxable income, not planting a crop specifically because it wouldn't make enough profit, gig-economy not paying living wages, a minimum wage below living wage, predatory lending, algorithmic social media that swings elections, targetted advertisement psyops, marketing to children, cosmetic surgery in general but especially for children, forced conversion 'therapy', experimental life saving treatments gate-kept by money, planned obsolescence, plastic packaging...
In combat sports, we're really not too far removed from the collisuem, just that it's "not meant to be to the death" even though it does often result in death or lifelong conditions. The fighters get paid, the organizers get paid, the arena gets paid, the advertisers get paid...All in the name of watching someone not quite kill someone.
Hell, we've even still got slavery tucked neatly away behind "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.", but we know that many sitting in prison are demonstrably innocent. The prison is allowed to require that every inmate works. You're allowed to run an organization that profits from these slaves. You are not legally required to pay in some states.
It's curious to me that so many progressives or soi-disant leftists are in favor of dissolving these types of moral and social traditions while being fervently anti-capitalist. It seems that they (meaning the subset who are always looking for new fenceposts to tear down) are in fact the shock troops of Capital.
Your morals have nothing to do with what others do with their own body.
Probably. We don't call it prostitution anymore it's now called, "sex work."
Btw it’s not just those two, add iGaming into the mix which is cell phone gambling glammed up in Candy Crush form. Leeches, all of them.
Proof if proof needed of the complete pointlessness of casino gambling. Some people will still do it even when they know they can't win anything.
Some brokerages are more strict, but plenty just let you check boxes.
Of course you can still lie but legally there is a line.
If you had to take and pass a test, that might filter out more people; although I'm sure the seller would help you pass the test, so maybe not.
its purpose is simple. if you lose the money of sufficiently powerful people, as a middleman, the standard exposes you one more kind of legal jeopardy.
Oooh, Claude is giving me a free spi... reset until October 22? Maybe I will stay on their Max plan. My tokens aren't getting me as far as previously, maybe I should buy another plan? Man, I just got this one new startup idea, I know this will be the one where investors will love me. I can feel it. C'mon Opus, just one more session... come ooon...
I think that really framed the issue well to me. Imagine having an addiction problem and having to carry the problem substance around with you 24/7.
Every personality has something, it seems, that it tends to get addicted to if given the chance. Gambling has never been that to me. I get bored with most of the games and upset at losing money—even if I net win, I’m irritated about the incremental losses.
On the other hand, I have to manually keep track of how many days in a month I drink because if I don’t I’ll happily have half a bottle of wine every evening, and I think I know where that leads. (When I lose money in a casino I almost always translate that into a nice dinner. Which I will, invariably, enjoy far more than winning imaginary numbers.)
While you don't appear to be susceptible, it is notable that this mindset is not something that makes you less likely to develop a gambling problem. It's actually part of how they drive addiction. A customer who is annoyed at every loss is often a customer who will chase their losses with more/bigger bets, trying to get the winning high back.
That makes sense. When I lose a bit the boredom accelerates and I just want to leave. I’ve “spent” the money on an experience and it was boring.
The only exception to this is card games. But I don’t like those at casinos or on my phone. And I’d be happier playing a board game with most of the folks I play poker with.
Haven't followed all that closely for some other games, but it very much seems like the model for NBA2k is to release a new game with some minor patches each year, charge 70$, then spend the majority of that year crafting patches for the card game to keep whales interested in constantly spending on new packs(which are promptly devalued on the next release, and straight up killing the prior year's game's online service, makes them entirely worthless the next year).
I worked with a state lottery that did similar things. Their target demographic was the “every day players” that would compulsively buy at the gas station.
I quit that job because it seems to be morally wrong.
Betting apps are just this taken to the extreme, I feel for people with this addiction but it’s not going away anytime soon.
So I'm guessing this varies state by state.
Not equating your work for a lottery with dealing heroin, I’m just pointing out that to say you don’t want people addicted to heroin while still selling heroin isn’t sufficient, and I think the same applies to lotteries. If they acknowledge the problem stop even offering it as a product.
Acknowledging the problem doesn't make it go away: you must be a big war on drugs guy? right?
The retailers still have every incentive to sell as many lottery tickets as people will buy, because that's how they make a sizable portion of their money.
And the gambling addiction hotlines are too little too late. I've known people who struggled with gambling. They never admitted they had a problem until they had bottomed out. At that point I doubt the lotteries and casinos particularly care because that well's already run dry, anyway.
If the gaming industry really wanted to put their money where their mouth is on this one, they'd figure out ways to prevent people from getting into that situation in the first place. Putting limits on how much money anyone person can lose, even if only at a single establishment, is one idea that wouldn't even be hard to implement. But of course we won't see that because, unlike gambling addiction hotlines, that runs the risk of reducing their profits.
Why? This wasn't a thing that existed 10-15 years ago, this isn't some long-standing institution. We could ban online betting apps today if we wanted to.
Now those rich and powerful people exist, and they will use their wealth and power to keep it legal. It is not easy to put the genie back into the bottle.
It's pretty wild that we let it be advertised and boggles my mind that pro leagues jumped on the train.
That's wild. Wasn't the whole point of having a state lottery to put the state in a better position to be able to discourage people from becoming addicted? The very idea of a "target demographic" seems contrary to that goal; the "target" should be to have nobody buying tickets.
This was my takeaway as well. Is anyone surprised at this outcome?
Ah... Got it... The same galaxy brains that think p(foom) has a materially greater value than an epsilon minimally >0 to avoid divide by zero errors believe in lottery tickets. Got it. Explains a lot, thanks...
https://www.americanexperiment.org/study-finds-weak-relation...
Your $1 lottery coupon has extremely low chances of winning a million dollars, but they aren't zero. No one will sell you any stocks for $1, but even if they did what is a chance of a random $1 stock increasing in value one million times?
You have been able to buy mutual funds in dollar increments for like forever, with the significant caveat that there's often a minimum purchase amount, but once you hold that you can add in single dollars if you want +/- they only deal in a certain number of decimals.
Fractional share trading of stocks and ETFs happens at a lot of brokers for the past several years, too. Do they really want you to buy $1 of BRK.A? probably not, but you probably can.
Also, there's like penny stocks. :P
But yeah, there's no mechanism for that $1 to turn into millions of dollars within a few days. It can happen with a very well timed purchase, many decades, and some inflation, but that's not very exciting.
Just like AI p(Doom) in the next decade is approximately zero, but we all have to pretend to it's between 1 and 10% so American frontier labs can implement regulatory capture.
So if what you're saying is you are willing to bet $1 if I give you a 1 in 1 billion chance of winning $1M, I will take that bet. And I will take that bet as many times as you'd like.
But your best chance of winning $1M? Start with $10M.
Apparently that's not true for sports betting. A 2024 study out of Connecticut found that 1.8% of problem gamblers in the state accounted for 51% of sports betting revenue.[1]
[1] https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/DMHAS/Publications/2023-CT-FIN...
I also get loads Polymarket and Kalshi ads. Polymarket seems to have invested tons into featuring mega celebs like LeBron in one of their ads. Other ads feature influencers showing off how to trade and such. More obnoxious part is that these companies pay influencers to talk about trading and winning live on streams- without disclosing they're paying those influencers.
Polymarket even set up fake website where influencers showed they were winning hundreds of thousands of dollars. You wouldn't find those bets on the real Polymarket website.
Marijuana is not zero harm, but guess what: Making it illegal is ALSO not zero harm. The drug war is an abject failure, US consumers have driven Mexico into a failed state with roving gangs of narcos who murder crowds of people with impunity.
"Studies say..." OK. Actually study weed then. Actually do clinical trials and apply science and tell us the actual results. Actually doing that has been prevented because it is a scheduled drug federally. So all we have is folk wisdom and half-baked one-off studies. "Linked to" has no scientific value, it is a term the news uses to scare people.
I think people should be informed and be allowed to make their own choices, as opposed to creating a huge and tyrannical law enforcement agency that will ruin a kids life for carrying a plant around.
Always funny how conservatives are the party of freedom, unless it's something they don't like.
Except when it comes to protesting certain things.
Existence isn't safe, and it's not up to the state to try to make it safe for you. It's our responsibility as a society to ensure that you have maximum liberty, insofar as it does not directly harm other people.
You are entirely free (or, should be) to harm yourself, or to make decisions that put yourself in danger.
https://prospect.org/2026/07/07/economic-hit-men-for-gamblin...
I wish gambling was outlawed entirely. Let bookies run it in some crack dens, I don't care about that, but every single gambling ad I see in the open is infuriating for me like no other ads. It's been seeping into sports commentary and even news on TV, "oh I don't think we have a full picture of the situation Kalshi has it at 60%", die in a fire. It's comparable to scammers preying on grandma.
No, I don't care about the "but liberty!" arguments.
We need a better way of responding to journalism evidencing what was previously suspected and accepted.
Money Stuff did a great bit on this a few days ago. There's 2 functions inside DraftKings:
- Fin the most lucrative customers, to keep engaging them.
- Finds addicted gamblers, to get them help to quit gambling.
These are the same people.
Sure, yeah, there's a nice little story about gambling within your means, blah blah. But if you're optimizing your gambling app, you're going to find and create problematic gambling as the core objective.
AI, ML, whatever. It's a gambling company. It targets gamblers. It probably shouldn't exist.
What amazed me was that Chris Christie (then governor of NJ) used state money to fund SIX consecutive lawsuits trying to get online gambling legalized in New Jersey.
You actually login or god forbid pay for a subscription, all of your matches are disabled bot accounts. I actually have a theory that daiting apps are responsible for a significant portion if not most of those bots.
I’m actually more willing to work on a gambling or prediction product vs a dating app.
At least everyone knows gambling is a scam.
It’s much harder for a 49 year old man to pretend to be 23 year old woman to try to get you to buy feet pics in real life vs online.
DraftKings: Hi we're going to give you extra incentives! User: Hmm, sounds like I might like that. How do I get them? DraftKings: You have to lose constantly! And then when you start winning, we take them away! You like that, don't you? User: No.
Dark Pattern. No new rules needed. "Just" enforcement.
And by that I mean almost no one in charge will be held responsible.
Casinos are a for profit business. If we don’t want them pursuing the path of least resistance we need regulation and enforcement.
You will find a lot of people who will tell you they win at these things. They don't. How do I know this? Because if you win consistently, they kick you off. You're bad for business because the pigeons need to win occasionally to keep playing (and losing).
Gambling (and I include Kalshi and Polymarket here) shouldn't be this accessible. Back when you had to go to a casino, it was still bad but that barrier prevented a lot of harm. Being able to gamble away your future and your family's future from the comfort of your phone simply shouldn't be allowed.
As an example, if anybody tells you their commute to work is 25 minutes, it's more likely 45 minutes. "It takes me 10 minutes to get to X" really means 20. I don't know what it is but people just don't get this right.
It's way worse when it comes to money. "My income is $X" literally means "My income is 0.3X to 0.7X". I need to see employment contracts and W2s before I believe you what you say about your salary. People will even lie anonymously (eg on surveys). It's like they need to believe it themselves.
So when you say you have friends who net win hundreds of dollars, unless you've seen P&Ls, I don't believe them. And I'm sure these sites don't make it easy to figure out your total P&L because then you might stop. People will remember and boast about their wins and downplay or just plain forget their losses. They'll minimize losses and exaggerate wins. It's just human nature.
Ever notice how no gambler says they consistently lose? Everyone is somehow a winner? Isn't that sus?
This is only true in some cases and entirely depends on your form of gambling. Draftkings and Fanduel both run "daily fantasy" and sportbooks, and they are quite different. If you win consistently enough on the sportsbook, then you are taking money from the house, and they will ban you. The "daily fantasy" gambling on the other hand, works on a paramutual basis where they take their profits off the top. For example they will take 20% of the total prize pool regardless of who ends up winning or losing. Much like the track when it comes to horse racing, they don't care who wins or loses because they are getting the same % either way, and the more volume there is the more money they make.
People with personality disorders, depression, anxiety, etc. all algorithmically being plied for attention. It's disgusting and nobody is doing anything about it, which will eventually erode buy-in in the system until someone is willing to let it all go without an adversary even firing a shot.
Anybody seen those billboards? It’s disgusting.