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UK betting giant's unlawful marketing kept suicidal gambler hooked

theguardian.com

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Re: UK betting giant's unlawful marketing kept suicidal gambler hooked

#71

Post by chickenimprint »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #14

I'm in the UK and have been applying for dev jobs over the last six months. I've had at least five approaches from recruiters representing gambling companies. They seem to have a lot of money to spend on salaries, and promise experience of languages like Go, and also ML, data science, etc. I always give them the same answer: no. I don't work for parasites. I remember the time before the Blair government unwisely dere…

A just, healthy society would target and remove those who enrich themselves at the expense of others. The continued existence of society rests upon cooperation beating defection. The exponential rise of legal gambling in the western world is a massive blow to public trust in institutions who were supposed to act in the interest of the people, and a sign of rampant corruption and societal decay.

Re: UK betting giant's unlawful marketing kept suicidal gambler hooked

#72

Post by Retric »

Retric wrote: post #60
echoangle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you find a link for me if it’s not hard? https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63bc25b4d3bf7... This looks fairly official and cites 1.05 to 1.77 billion £ in societal cost on page 6. That’s less than 14 billion £.

Edit: “Gross Gambling Yield (GGY) of British gambling industry (2021 to 2022): £14.1 billion” Which is simply revenue before costs not actual tax revenue it even excludes loyalty programs with cash back rewards on losses, actual tax revenues are dramatically lower. https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/guidance/regulatory-re... That’s looking at harm specifically not economic costs. Direct taxes to the state are £3.3…

Just to put some numbers to lost revenue from other spending. UK VAT is 20%. 14B in direct spending + 1.5 Billion spending from avoided economic harm at 20% vat is 15.5 - 15.5 /1.2 = 2.6 billion in “missed” revenue.

So offsetting ~1.5 billion in harm is an optimistic net gain of 0.7 billion in tax revenue.

Re: UK betting giant's unlawful marketing kept suicidal gambler hooked

#76

Post by throwaway2037 »

giantg2 wrote: post #35
DrBazza wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the government that was supposed to stand up 'for the poor', but allowing a predatory industry to thrive, whose main demographic are 'the poor'.

Have there been any governments in the developed world in the past 25 years that has actually stood up for the poor? I know some have said they would but it seems like their ideas are just expansion of benefits programs that don't actually help the problem or move the stats. Seems more like buying votes.

Japan has dramatically expanded social benefits for young families in the past 25 years. I would say these programmes mostly benefit the middle class and below. The US didn't have national healthcare before President Obama. Millions of middle and low income people are now insured under that programme. President George W. Bush helped to add coverage for prescription drugs to Medicare (national health insurance for retired people). This is just a short list. I am sure others can provide a many examples from Korea, Taiwan, Scandinavia or AU/NZ.

Re: UK betting giant's unlawful marketing kept suicidal gambler hooked

#77

Post by locallost »

Retric wrote: post #66
locallost wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automotive industry. If you factor in climate change, then fossil fuel industry first and foremost, but actually quite a lot of them.

Automobiles have serious positive externalities. Even just ambulances and fire trucks are a major societal benefit. I’m drawing a blank on the positive externalities gambling provides to offset its downsides? Reducing illegal gambling...

The question was which industries with such negative externalities get tolerated.

So:

* 1.2 million people die every year in car accidents

* 200k children die every year

* pollution, air pollution, but also noise pollution

* people sitting in traffic for hours every day, effectively doing nothing productive

* decade long destruction of communities to build roads.

* additionally and especially in the US these have been used to target communities of minorities

* Etc.

It does have also positive externalities, but the rare communities worldwide that decided to promote other means of transport in every day life have found they are better off. Thus in a lot of cases the negatives outweigh the positives.

Is this an excuse for gambling? No, but there are many of these around us in every day life, we just don't notice them. So I was merely answering a question asked.

Re: UK betting giant's unlawful marketing kept suicidal gambler hooked

#79

Post by Jean-Papoulos »

locallost wrote: post #77
Retric wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automobiles have serious positive externalities. Even just ambulances and fire trucks are a major societal benefit. I’m drawing a blank on the positive externalities gambling provides to offset its downsides? Reducing illegal gambling...

The question was which industries with such negative externalities get tolerated. So: * 1.2 million people die every year in car accidents * 200k children die every year * pollution, air pollution, but also noise pollution * people sitting in traffic for hours every day, effectively doing nothing productive * decade long destruction of communities to build roads. * additionally and especially in the US these have bee…

I'd like to see those communities surviving to the same standards of living without having motor vehicles around them either. You want to build walls out of concrete ? Or wood even ? Well, have fun transporting all that in a cart.

Those communities have phones. Manufactured goods. They're watching Game of Thrones. If you remove motor vehicles all of that simply isn't possible due to the loss of productivity.

While I agree that preventing the intrusion of motor vehicle in residential areas would be good (ie have main roads where they're allowed, and small residential streets where they aren't. Lots of cities in Europe shifting to this currently), saying that the negatives outweigh the positives "in a lot of cases" I think is completely incorrect.

Re: UK betting giant's unlawful marketing kept suicidal gambler hooked

#80

Post by rcxdude »

dutchbookmaker wrote: post #45
giantg2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty rampant in the US too. I don't think a little gambling is bad, but the endless ads are a huge problem. They should really make all advertising of commonly addictive stuff banned - gambling, alcohol, etc. They should also do a better job of educating kids in school about the dangers and tricks. They were going you $100+ to open an account, or doing a deposit match up to $1k here. It's exactly what drug dea…

I think sports betting is obnoxious and stupid but I do worry about this moral policing some seem to want to do. The people I know losing money to online sports betting are the same people who thought they were going to become pro online poker grinders 15 years ago. If you got rid of online sports betting they would go play slots at the casino more and waste their money on the lottery. If you get rid of all games of…

It's a case of the relative amounts and proportions of harm. Gambling is something where a small but not insignificant percentage of the population have an addiction problem - they're prone to get hooked and basically lose all their money. Now, this isn't something that's absolute: someone may be susceptible to this but not actively seek it out, especially to the extent of going to a black market bookie or similar. So the fact that it's so heavily advertised is going to increase the harm to these people.

Secondly, the bookies have a strong incentive to perpetuate this harm: much like with gatcha video games, which have the exact same moral hazard (and are exactly modeled on gambling), the 'whales' who get completely addicted bring in so much more revenue than those who occasionally gamble a little for a bit of fun, that even if they're a minority of customers they can make up the majority of revenue, and so they're going to make more money if they optimize for hooking them (there are some guardrails, to be fair: in contrast to said video games, there is a system where you can ban yourself from all the major bookies if you realize you have a problem. Probably doesn't make the ads any easier to sit through, though).

I'm not in favor of banning gambling altogether: I realise it's something a lot of people can engage with healthily, even if I have no interest in it at all. But I would be in favor of reigning in the advertising of it: it's kind of obnoxious how large a percentage of it is present in sports media anyway, even without the harms done. (I feel the same about alcohol ads, even if that is something I do like, and alcohol has a much lower moral hazard from the manufacturers in terms of hooking in alcoholics, because the ratios are not so extreme)

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