101–110 of 311 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"perversion of sports" is a particularly American viewpoint, I think! The latent streak of puritanism, maybe. Yet, somehow, the NCAA (which is wage theft on a truly industrial scale) is morally okay. It's weird. (The intersection with US ad culture – for existence, drug ads on TV – is maybe also unique.) Sport has, as a business, always been random number generation for gambling purposes. Some, like horseracing, have…
> The latent streak of puritanism, maybe The main problem is that addiction kind of goes around people's interests and their better judgement. Normally I agree, we don't need to be making 'moral' decisions for people. If they want to do something 'sinful' - like gambling - have at it. But the people who promote gambling have lots of money. And gambling is basically smoking. So, it gets hairy. They can lie, they can c…
Prohibition has generally been a lot less effective than regulation. The problem in the US, in my view, is much more the utterly-gutted effectiveness of the regulatory state than it is the existence of legal gambling.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked at a biotechnology company, we had thousands of clients but five of them were 80% of our revenue. In your world, should that business not exist as well? I don't understand the princple that revenue should be uniformly distributed as a condition for existing. How would you enforce this?
I presume one would just continuously uniformly distribute everything till they arrived at communism lmao
For example, tobacco is now extremely restricted. That's an obvious industry that profits off of addiction. We went ahead and fixed that. The result? Millions of lives saved.
Oh, but the spooky hypothetical communism! Come on kids, light up these cigs! They make you look cool and masculine! Oh woe is the modern American for being a commie!
Sports betting has the side effect of making things surrounding sports themselves more toxic. Betting being as pervasive as it is, and only increasing, causes more people to view and interact with sports with bets or money, and thus can react negatively toward their losing teams. If there's a large number of angry, vocal "fans" jumping down your neck every time you lose a game or make a mistake that caused their bet…
It also infects players and referees. It's harder to trust referees in a sport where you know what the big bets are, whether or not the refs are actually cheating to try to change the outcome it's hard not to feel that they might be. Baseball alone has had some prominent sports gambling by players in its past change the record books. There's a bunch of interesting arguments for and against that maybe the records for…
If sports betting isn't checking on this and cracking down there is a major problem.
The fact that ESPN itself has a sports betting app tells you all you need to know about the perversion of sports now that gambling is blessed by the government. I think I can live with the legalization of sports betting if there are strong restrictions against marketing and advertising. If you want to ruin your life that's your decision, and you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock ma…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The latent streak of puritanism, maybe The main problem is that addiction kind of goes around people's interests and their better judgement. Normally I agree, we don't need to be making 'moral' decisions for people. If they want to do something 'sinful' - like gambling - have at it. But the people who promote gambling have lots of money. And gambling is basically smoking. So, it gets hairy. They can lie, they can c…
Absolutely addiction does; so we're going to ban alcohol (and weed), and then maybe move onto video games and books and and and and? Prohibition has generally been a lot less effective than regulation. The problem in the US, in my view, is much more the utterly-gutted effectiveness of the regulatory state than it is the existence of legal gambling.
Who says we need to keep going? That's not a hypothetical question - who says? Why would we do that?
I agree regulation is good, but prohibition is a type of regulation. There're also levels of prohibition - you don't need to prohibit all of it, maybe just the most obviously harmful.
Like you can ban online gambling but keep casinos if you want. I don't know, I don't have the analysis on which is worse.
The fact that ESPN itself has a sports betting app tells you all you need to know about the perversion of sports now that gambling is blessed by the government. I think I can live with the legalization of sports betting if there are strong restrictions against marketing and advertising. If you want to ruin your life that's your decision, and you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock ma…
These apps should be banned. Gambling is a social ill with such a limited upside and so much harm it can't really be justified
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"perversion of sports" is a particularly American viewpoint, I think! The latent streak of puritanism, maybe. Yet, somehow, the NCAA (which is wage theft on a truly industrial scale) is morally okay. It's weird. (The intersection with US ad culture – for existence, drug ads on TV – is maybe also unique.) Sport has, as a business, always been random number generation for gambling purposes. Some, like horseracing, have…
> Yet, somehow, the NCAA (which is wage theft on a truly industrial scale) is morally okay. It's weird. Outside of top men's basketball and football programs, there is no real wage theft occurring. These minor sports are avocations for student athletes, and not businesses for the universities.
Edit: but even when money is being made, the athletes don't get it.