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Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

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Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#111
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NIL loophole? Yeah, not really, and not enforceably, and examples of teams reneging are not hard to find.

Not NIL. lawsuit in court right now is reaching a settlement to directly pay players. https://www.npr.org/2024/05/24/nx-s1-4978680/house-ncaa-sett...

22% of revenue, not employees, colleges don't accept employer liability. This settlement should be rejected as unconscionable.

Public universities (and private universities which actually care about education!) would be well advised to get out of the business of running professional sports teams, I think.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#112
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a big slippery slope here. 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 analys…

Fine, but then the US has spent a terrifying amount of my money on sports and I want it all back if the point of their sophisticated pro-social spending (which strangely has to include private ventures getting handouts) is actually to extract wealth from the poor and the weak.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#113
post #102

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.

So then you must have a clear set of principles on how to regulate gambling to maintain it as a healthy activity with no degenerate pathways?

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#114
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a big slippery slope here. 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 analys…

>Who says we need to keep going? That's not a hypothetical question - who says? Why would we do that?

Why wouldn't we? If we're legally precluding people from hobbies that could harm them, there's always going to be a worst legal one.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#115
post #61
post #53

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…

I'm surprised that people seem to just now realize that sports betting is a bad idea. As you said, the worst aspect is the large amount of marketing and advertising these platforms receive; I wouldn't care if they weren't pushed so heavily.

Now apply that same kind of thinking to legalized prostitution and human trafficking.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presume one would just continuously uniformly distribute everything till they arrived at communism lmao

Or, if we decide to come back to Earth, we simply make the obvious restrictions on a case by case basis via cost analysis. Then we stop when we feel like it. 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…

What if I want to grow a plant and smoke it? Who are you to take that away from me? What if your experience of life doesn't align with mine, and my cost/benefit analysis for me personally is that I gain more from smoking than I lose?

That aside, I wasn't advocating for smoking to defend capitalism, and think you appear disingenuous for suggesting that. Merely that that is the end route of just dividing everything equally. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say attempting to divide everything equally doesn't work.

Edit: Apparently I'm arguing against someone I'm unable to reply to, go figure. Either way they appear to be now arguing for the status quo, over 18 regulated gambling, which I fail to see has anything to do with sharing equally, and for some reason they're acting like what they're advocating for is not the status quo. I think I may have stumbled into an argument with a nonsense Chinese LLM lol

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#117
Much like many substance use disorders, I am inclined the to believe the substance is merely a self-medication technique for a deeper rooted issue.

I am curious what about the gambling makes it so addictive? I refuse to believe that people are addicted solely because of bro-science's elementary understanding dopamine. What makes people continue despite the negative consequences in their lives? Is it the hope? The hope that if they win big, then a better life awaits them or that the money will fix all their problems?

I am not sure if I have ever had a "real addiction^1," but I definitely have had psychological dependencies/self-medication strategies with things like video games and Internet usage.

I am quite an introspective person, thus the underlying reasons were never a mystery to me. I wasn't "addicted" to gaming nor the Internet because they are just fun or entertaining. Each served a different purpose in my life. Mostly through out my early childhood and into my young adult life.

With games, I felt that, in whatever virtual world I was playing in, that I was able to be more than I could in real life. I could gain competence and mastery of "skills." I felt like I was a useful; a person people that could count on. My hard work would materialize right before my very eyes. Do and get . I was no longer the [undiagnosed] weird, anxious and depressed person with ADHD. In the games, I was no longer "lazy" nor a "failure." People weren't trying to "discipline" the issues out of me. Games allowed me to be something the world would never allow me to be -- myself.

The Internet was different though. I was like Ponce De Leon in search of the Fountain of Youth. I believed that there was some sort of knowledge, that once discovered, then all my problems would subside. Like some sort of metaphorical magical spell. Once I came across it, I would know it. The answers were out there, and I just needed to find them. However, much like Ponce De Leon, what I was looking for did not exist. But hey, at least I read and learned a lot. =D

There has to be something deeper to gambling addiction. If so, then what is it?

[1] I define addiction as a dependency in which one is unable to resist despite it causing real, tangible harm in one or more areas of one's life -- school, work, relationships, etc..

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#118
post #115
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that people seem to just now realize that sports betting is a bad idea. As you said, the worst aspect is the large amount of marketing and advertising these platforms receive; I wouldn't care if they weren't pushed so heavily.

Now apply that same kind of thinking to legalized prostitution and human trafficking.

I'm far from an expert in the issue, but I think that most people that support the legalization of prostitution don't support the legalization of human trafficking.

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#119
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll. The fact that the pros are simulating problem players because then the betting apps give you more leeway, e.g. by "send[ing] you bonus money" and raising your limits, paints the picture quite effectively in my book. > Casino's can't survive off casual players. They need the addicts to make payroll To what degree is this true? Sure, a…

This is backwards. Casinos offer huge cross subsidization opportunities like getting people to spend lots of money in clubs and bars or gamble on games like slots that have a huge house edge while apps have near zero cross subsidization opportunities and massive overhead. An app running at draftkings scale costs a lot to operate. I’ve believed for a long time and continue to that the math on these businesses just doe…

Its not a matter of belief its a matter of math.

Their net income is either positive or negative

Re: Pro bettors disguising themselves as gambling addicts

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big slippery slope here. 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 analys…

>Who says we need to keep going? That's not a hypothetical question - who says? Why would we do that? Why wouldn't we? If we're legally precluding people from hobbies that could harm them, there's always going to be a worst legal one.

There's an ugliest painting in most galleries, but that doesn't mean we ban them. If the worst legal hobby is beneficial, why would anyone want to ban it? At some point before that, a threshold will be reached where people feel that the harms of a ban outweigh the harms of the practice. I really don't see how this slope is slippery.
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