I find it difficult to watch any sports these days because you are just constantly bombarded with sports betting ads and tie-ins. I have absolutely no interest in throwing my money away on sports bets and yet even I find myself wondering if I should try it out or maybe I could just open a trial account. It's dangerous and disappointing that this is the direction that all the major sports leagues are heading.
I agree. I don't have a moral problem with sports betting but it's not only commercial breaks, it's completely invaded the content itself. Sports commentary has become inseparable from betting and though I have no temptation, every minute of the content feels like predatory advertising. It's not fun anymore.
I sometimes listen to sport's radio and sometimes - too often - it's unlistenable. Too much focus on betting and no enough on the actual sports. I cringe when the shows' hosts talking about their personal betting.
I'm rather surprised at the return on spending on inline ads by gambling houses considering how much paperwork/fructuib there is setting up a DraftKings account on the spot.
regulation is impotent when it targets industry specifics rather than regulating adversarial psychology elements and the behaviors themselves.
it's a nice feel-good political ticket for would-be politicians, but all it does is create an arms race whack-a-mole condition for every single new industry that pops up and requires new regulation.
considering gambling : in the U.S. we outlaw new forms of gambling all day, but never dare to touch concepts that empower the gambling like addictive behavior psychology, short-term high-interest legal loan-sharking, whatever. We just ban the specific sports-bet-whatever and wait for the next one to sprout up, it's largely ineffective, that's why we're still talking about it.
Disabling the center channel of a surround sound system usually will kill the commentary during sporting events. Gets rid of it in a decent chunk of commercials too.
Tangential comment, I'm a passionate follower of formula one and have realised that basically anything advertised on F1 cars is "bad". Cigarettes are the obvious historical example, FTX is the more recent one.
There's many that are socially acceptable at the moment but only with the caveat of either "in moderation" or "for responsible adults": energy drinks, crypto, etc.
Google Chrome is one that a decent debate could be had about.
Microsoft Dynamics might be the exception that proves the rule... But I've never worked out what the hell the product actually is.
Dynamics is Microsoft (somewhat poorly) making a Salesforce for people who are all-in on the Microsoft ecosystem. In terms of collective human suffering caused per year of existence I would say it's on par with the rest of the stuff you've mentioned.
I made this comment purely from my impressions of the team's major sponsors and the ones that I've noticed. Realising that I'm rather advertising blind these days (like all of us, I figure), I thought I should actually dig up a list and have more of a think about this idea.
I don't know how we went from "you have to travel to Las Vegas or Atlantic City to gamble" to "You can gamble 24/7 on a device that's always with you." Anti-gambling laws were put in place for very well understood reasons.
Relentless petitions, one state at a time. I'll never forget the door to door and being approached in parking lots to sign petitions to get legal gambling on the ballot.
As far as I've read, it's psychologically identical. The scary thing about financial gambling like options-, day-, or forex-trading is that they seem respectable. Laypeople don't usually know that the person is gambling, and some people even think of it as a legitimate job.
That reminds me of a book quote I saw today, reproduced within another work about financial fraud. ("Lying for Money".)
> For the most part, it was based on two simple truths: first, that a majority of the richest one percent of Americans are closet degenerate gamblers, who can't withstand the temptation to keep rolling the dice again and again, even if they know the dice are loaded against them; and, second, that contrary to previous assumptions, young men and women who possess the collective social graces of a herd of sex-crazed water buffalo and have an intelligence quotient in the range of Forrest Gump on three hits of acid, can be taught to sound like Wall Street wizards [...]
There is also an argument to be made that actual gambling has less of a negative social impact.
Having been bored during the pandemic and gotten myself some gambling tokens at a brokerage site it turned out that i almost kinda funded some pretty severe human rights violations. Drones dropping grenades and mortar shells on indigenous people with bow and arrow type of stuff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSf3268tAbg
Maybe check your portfolio for Freeport-McMoRan
Funnily enough, the youtuber that made the video also had his house fire bombed by organized crime for reporting on Australias gambling industry.
Cryptocurrency trading & high risk stocks was part of the dataset of the study[1]. They also compare it to other gambling activities and risk groups further down.
There are similarities, but figuring out options trading on Robinhood is significantly more difficult. And I’m not bombarded with ads for options trading dozens of times per football game.
Only slightly related: can anyone speak to the syntax of headlines like this where the 'author' of statement is appended to the end? e.g. Statment: author. It seems to go against what seems to me more natural and common, which is 'author: statement', or even 'statement - author'. Just curious is all.
> “You can be gambling away your house on your mobile phone sitting at the dinner table, and not a single person will know until the devastation of your whole family is complete”
That sounds like a reasonable means of control then. These services could be locked to networks at locations with some kind of gaming license (something like a Keno license).
There’s outliers in everything, but forcing people to go somewhere to gamble gets the cookies out of the house. Loved ones can notice the destructive behavior before it’s too late. It will not stop people from being ruined by it, but it will make progress.
I don't understand. There's obviously a market for it. Can't folks decide that the price is too high? Are we really willing to accept that agents aren't rational? Wouldn't that have severe implications for other markets?
If you look at drug addicts as a group, the answer is often a direct and emphatic “no, they can’t” - the drug alters the way they perform that price calculus such that many of them will spend their last dollar, go deeply in debt, and do terrible things to continually chase a high. Drug policy has had many failures in the US, but there does seem to be a correct nugget of recognition that “some drugs seem to be fundamentally destructive to those that get addicted, and to the broader society that has to deal with the consequences of those who are addicted”.
Gambling in many people seems to have the same effect on altering price calculus in a way similar to addictive drugs, which at leasts motivates a reasonable discussion whether benefits of allowing it exceed the harms it causes those individuals and society.
What makes you think you arent just looking at the extremly visible dysfunction subgroup? How many cocaine consuming banksters do you know and what does that say about the completeness of your perspective? I think there is a good argument to be made that you are over generalizing from a stereotype.
I think there are subgroups of people that get caught up in certain routines they then have a hard time exiting. Drugs increase that risk but even here different people are vulnerable to different things. A good friend of mine told me with a straight face that his doctor explained to him that his BMI is in the "you are eating yourself to death" region. He told me this over refilling his glass of coca cola.
At the same time the bankster i know is still in the process of winning both capitalism and hedonism. I think it is likely more about how you manage your own weaknesses. One of them wont do this till he needs judicial/medical intervention.
edit: Never tried cocaine or heroin btw and had a rather easy time loosing weight. But i am very confident about the outcome of those two people. One has given up while the other knows he cant trust himself with this stuff, has planed and is acting accordingly and is able to grind through very unpleasant stuff.
> What makes you think you arent just looking at the extremly visible dysfunction subgroup?
What makes you think that is the case? Is there any statistical evidence to suggest that (for example) opioid additics are easily separable into one group that will consistently keep it "under control" and another group that is doomed?
There's also the time dimension--some of the people ruined today may have sure seemed like they had everything under control earlier in their lives, but the unstable equilibrium couldn't last forever.
While there might be hordes of people you would never expect who abuse serious drugs in unerringly competent secrecy throughout their lives... but at that point it starts to seem a little fallacious: All true Scotsmen are undetectable and you know they exist because they haven't been detected.
The fact that the incompleteness is easily shown. Whether you look at the overall number of people who have used a certain drug vs the number of people who ruined their life with it, or at individual cases that didnt develop that way.
I also wouldnt go as far as your reframing of "certain drugs have certain results" to "certain people have no problem with certain drugs". Given the high impact of a users socioeconomic background for how he develops i think you can look at the way people use a drug / perform addictive behavior and find pattern for the people most and least negatively effected. Its not that different from finding the group of people that get morbidly obese through overeating or get into debt for gambling. You can often tell them by their planed behavior and lack of self reflection and self control in that behavior.
You know certain stuff is addictive and messes with your self control. If this fact sneaks up on you or you planed to solve that with overconfidence in your self control you are pretty likely pretty screwed. And the people with the most problems here are those that keep going and accelerating despite knowing they have no more breaks.
Its also not something that should take you long to realize looking at how you stick to your planed consumption and your ability to react to that. Think days for some people. With the next group at risk those that fall asleep at the wheel. And so on. While i wouldnt risk it with cocaine and the likes, i think arguing that its impossible ignores a bunch of very successful people. You could argue that this just means those are the people who manage to stop on their own after it escalates and then stay away from it, but this ignores the people who somehow have a tendency for not accelerating routines they cant recover from too far. If i had to guess those might the the people who trust themselves the least, i am pretty sure you are unlikely to land in such an arrangement by luck.
We can of course argue about the difficulty of balancing on this spectrum for certain drugs, but pretending this is a matter of "there could be" and not the history of actual individuals sounds a lot like a self fulfilling prophecy. Especially since it glosses over the people who stopped their usage for other reasons then having lost control (health, happiness ...)
Individuals, their predisposition to certain drugs and addictions, their risk profile and their behavior are just very different.
That simplification seems counterproductive. There is obviously a spectrum of rationality that gets compromised by addiction. Be it heroin, alcohol, sugar or gambling.
There was a social engineering talk a while back that i cant find anyone where some sysadmin explained that just informing users they wanted to do something stupid was far more beneficial then just blocking their attempts.
Most of these addiction industries are profitable through addicts, the amount of cheap hard liquor bought by non-addicts is neglect able. Maybe just communicating with these people is far more sensible then banning something that people can also consume reasonably. Maybe somebody that spend his last 3 months rent on gambling wants to talk about how to not do that. While the notice on every visit is quite annoying.
Even if you cant let go of the demand for judicial intrusion altogether, maybe start with something like a one week detox after x months of behavior typical for an addict that lost control. It would likely get a lot of people over the diet hump they have been battling for years and sobering up long enough to reevaluate your life choices might not be the worst thing to do.
I'm assuming it's satire, but just in case, there's a whole body of economics built around recognizing market participant irrationality and trying to cope with it given Econ 101 assumptions.
There is absolutely no reason to be unregulated free-market absolutists about addictive behaviors, other than blind ideology. Regulations on gambling and gambling advertisements have been around for a long time because we know that people do not act rationally when it comes to this activity. This is not dissimilar to how legalized drugs like tobacco are treated.
The question for society to answer is "is the social costs of gambling addiction (which don't remain localized to the gambler themself) worth what we gain from unrestricted advertising?". I personally would say "hell no". Likewise with drugs, let's not eliminate legal methods. That just forces it underground. But that doesn't mean it should be promoted, or plastered all over billboards, arenas, and stadiums.
It's ridiculous these days watching any sports content, the amount of betting related ads is outrageous. I see no other outcome than droves of new gambling addicts.
In the mid-90s, a local dial-up ISP sent their support calls to me. I once put a local retiree couple online and went on my way. About 6 months later I came back to fix their connection which he promptly tested at a gambling site.
I also did service calls at their friends and neighbors. They said that since getting online he'd gambled away their retirement, maxed out their credit cards, got new cards & maxed those, took out a 2nd mortgage and gambled that off. That they'd lose the house was a certainty. The wife may not have known yet just how bad off they were.
