81–90 of 337 posts
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How about fast food or unhealthy food/drinks? And would you change anything about how prescription medication is advertised?
Prescription medication advertising is banned everywhere in the developed world except USA and New Zealand.
I'm pretty Laissez-Faire about things, but a recent interaction with gambling is making me reconsider: My friend got a lot of free credits from the major sports books and wrote some code that he felt could generate a profit. We all threw in a little bit of money and let the program do what it does. Within a month we started doing 1k a day in profit on 3k wagered. Right as we approached 30k in profit, every major book…
1k on 3k wagered sounds pretty suspicious. Also, the regularity you imply makes it even more suspicious. How did this program work?
Not really any other way to do it without fixing games.
Gambling is like drug use, some people are clearly addicted to it and will ruin their lives over it. How does society respond to this fact? War on drugs, war on gambling, etc. Hmmmmm
everyone's a winner, baby!
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This has been my position for a while on so called "vices". Prohibition is ineffective and often does more harm than good, but allowing companies to advertise these products to young people and those who are susceptible to abuse is a net negative for society. Worst of all are government run lotteries. A state run lottery may be preferable to one run by organized crime, but running millions of dollars worth of ads wit…
>Prohibition is ineffective and often does more harm than good I don't believe this is true, though it is often parroted as so. Effectiveness of prohibition is determined in large part on severity of punishments. It is imperfect, and will always be. But it can absolutely work to minimize the behavior being targeted.
Rather put a high tax, like tobacco products, do the state can make a boatload of money from vices rather than enriching the criminal underworld and indirectly funding illegal guns, sex trade, rackets etc...
Anecdotally, my own country banned alcohol and cigarette sales during the first lockdown. The black market rose from nowhere and made a filthy amount of money. You can guess whether or not the violent crime rate has increased of decreased.
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1k on 3k wagered sounds pretty suspicious. Also, the regularity you imply makes it even more suspicious. How did this program work?
Not OP, but if I had to guess, the coder just looked for the most favorable 'prop bets' that books use to get the casuals in the door and took advantage of those favorable odds. Not really any other way to do it without fixing games.
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I spent some time in Montana and was shocked to see how many businesses have "casinos" attached to them. I never got to look inside but I think these are basically a small room with a few slot machines. They were everywhere. For example, I ate at a chinese restaurant and there was a side room advertising poker and keno. I came away feeling like there was a web that would catch every single person in the state who had…
Cook county IL (the county that encompasses Chicago) legalized some forms of gambling (not in Chicago). Gas stations, bars & even hair salons now have game rooms in them. I find it pretty sad as there is no glamor at all in dunking dollars into bad slot machines at a shell station. But I didn’t find the scratch off tickets they sold at the counter glamorous either.
https://www.propublica.org/article/illinois-video-gambling-w...
These are interesting reads regarding slot parlors in Illinois. It gets repeated in every locale that legalizes slots. Big promises of increased tax revenues, then the actuals are 10%-30% of the forecasts, but by then the horse is already out of the barn. I've looked at a few state level gaming commission data sets and backed out the math, and even in backwoods areas, penny slot machines generate $20/hr average ($240/day) in gross income (even though they're called penny slots, you can easily lose $20 in under 60 seconds based on speed of play, number of lines and bet sizing-- all of which are heavily optimized to trigger reward centers in the brain), so even with expensive $5-10k machines, the recovery time is pretty low, so they'll just metastasize as much as legally allowed.
Since covid started, it seems like every other commercial these days is for either sports betting (FanDuel, DraftKings) or online casinos (all of the big casino companies have an 'online' counterpart) They all advertise some sort of $100 risk-free bets or something of that nature. Was this some sort of concession to physical casinos since their customers weren't able to come on-site and gamble?
I think the timing is unrelated. There was a supreme court ruling in 2018 that paved the way.
> Wagering on sports is “endemic and acceptable and so mainstream that it is now a major pillar of American entertainment,” said Timothy Fong, one of the directors of the gambling studies program at U.C.L.A. A rhetorical technique: Make the problem seem inevitable, make any opposition seem powerless. Then make the question about the rest of society adapting to it - everyone has to adapt so the gambling industry can m…
Do you think sports gambling is not inevitable? Because until relatively recently, it was illegal in the US outside of Vegas and it still very much happened. Whether it was a local bookie or offshore betting websites, anybody that wanted to gamble already was. The only difference is that none of it was taxed.
I watch football with my kids, and now they want to try gambling, after seeing thousands of sports book ads. I find it really depressing.
I can confirm that sports betting is also slowly eating away at what is left of the game of football (soccer, for US HN-ers) over here in Europe. We’ve got the English Premier League and the Champions League that are (maybe) still free of this cancer, as in (maybe) their results and general play are as close to 100%-fair as one can get, but outside of that it’s the Wild West. The second leagues in most of Central and…
Are you saying that players are throwing games due to sports betting? Can you give an example? I'm not doubting you, I have never followed football so I have no idea, I'm just curious. Especially about your statement "...if you know where to look and how to look at things it all becomes clear(er)".
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https://www.theringer.com/2019/6/5/18644504/sports-betting-b... This is a long read, but is really insightful on how the industry really works. If you're a consistently winning bettor, you're going to get blocked pretty quickly when you're betting against the house. Why would a casino want to play a game where they don't have odds in their favor when they can just ban the sharps and feast on the casuals? With parimut…
I think that should be illegal. If we are going to allow casinos to operate at all, then we shouldn't allow them to discriminate against potential customers on the basis that said customers are better at the game. If that means their business model is no longer viable, then that is their problem.