141–150 of 479 posts
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> Again no one thought that was fun in the 90s, everyone hated that aspect of cards in the 90s How old was everyone in the 1990s? Kids loved this kind of thing in the 2000s.
The same age as kids in the 2000's?
Sports gambling ads have ruined sports media. State lottery ads are even worse. The government should not spend money to encourage its own citizens to partake in harmful activities.
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I can readily believe that to be true, but my point still stands, the person I'm replying to made a really sweeping and incorrect statement.
You don’t think it’s ethically and morally questionable to frequent a business that knowingly harms the majority of its customers? I agree there’s a some sort of gray area here, but it feels awfully narrow… especially with the recent sports betting companies.
The way I resolve this is “What if everyone did what I did?”. The restaurants would obviously have to change. I figure the type of demand I create is more powerful than how they might use the profit.
I think the same thing applies here. If everyone only gambled responsibly, these companies would all be in the responsible gambling business.
At the same time, I think sports gambling has completely gotten out of control and needs to be more regulated. More advertising regulation seems like a good place to start.
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Has society ever addressed an underlying psychological problem successfully? Because when it comes to the underlying psychological causes of homelessness and drug addiction and school shootings and violent extremism my impression is we don’t really do much.
Do all of these occur with equal proportion in every country/culture? I am not sure what you are saying with homelessness...it isn't some massive baffling issue, someone who doesn't have a house, needs a house so build a house? School shootings...I don't understand how anyone can believe this is normal? The US has fairly obvious social problems, these essentially inhibit the functional resolution of most of these pro…
> Build houses.
That doesn't solve homelessness, as we build many houses in America but they aren't being filled with the homeless. You need to apply social services in a complex systematic approach to provide housing that people can afford sustainably, and rehabilitate and integrate people into society. You might think that is a bit of a bad faith "gotcha" like, of course you have to make the housing free and ensure homeless people know it's available. But it's not a small detail to elide, even in context, and doing so is exactly why your thinking is off-base. You haven't even begun to unpack it properly, putting aside the falsehoods. Think about it, what do you do if someone doesn't want to accept the housing for complex reasons like pride or embarrassment? What if it's some crust punk kid riding suicide as a rite of passage? You have to deal with a lot of that! You can't just ignore it!
> Get people clean, harsh sentences for dealing.
Punitive measures have proven to be a complete and total failure globally. Even in Asia, where penalties on all sides of the drug trade are high, drug usage is very easy to find and rising. I say this as someone connected to Asia and with a fair amount of "street smarts" that some seem to lack. Japan and Korea don't even try to hide it anymore. Chinese cities are kept clean through a complex system of travel controls and consistent policing to sweep things under the rug. It's easy to score if you pass as Chinese outside of the tier 1 and 2 cities though. Even Saudi Arabia is flooded with black market drugs if you know where to look. Punitive measures empirically do not work.
> Violent extremism? Jail
Where is that not the case? Like what are you talking about? Do you know how common attempted domestic terrorism was against the US power grid and cell towers in 2020/2021? No, you don't. Almost nobody does, and certainly nobody has an exact number. That's because it was kept very quiet and the thousands of incidents were suppressed from the media cycle while the people involved were quietly thrown into the maximum security incarceration hole never to be seen again.
The person you're replying to is right. These issues are solved, and it means looking at why people want to do any of this to begin with and addressing that. You cut it off at the behavioral source. Think of it like this, do you check every pointer before you dereference it? No. You avoid bad pointer dereferences primarily through proper structure of your code.
You almost tap into this with being cognizant of the fact that it's not universal. It depends greatly on the country and culture. Because some countries and cultures have done a much better job at building worthwhile, healthy societies than others.
I don't think you can kill corporate run gambling - people will just use some offshore website instead. It might be something we should treat more like smoking. - Require a disclosure of the EV of each bet as the user is placing it. E.g.: Expected loss $5. - Ad targeting restrictions.
You can't kill murder; murder will always exist. Surely, like murder, and other negative outcome behaviors, we can reduce the occurrences, right?
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Anti-Smoking, especially in teenagers, seems to have been successful.
Vaping is counteracting that somewhat. (There's the perception among many kids that vaping is deeply uncool – and they'd be correct – but that's not something we can rely on.)
There has recently been many looks at the epidemic in gambling. Wonder how all of the focus seem to happen at the same time Off the top of my head: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-31/great-bri... https://kyla.substack.com/p/gamblemerica-how-sports-betting-... https://www.ft.com/content/e80df917-2af7-4a37-b9af-55d23f941... https://www.dopaminemarkets.com/p/the-lottery-fication-of-ev... https://www.inve…
I find it odd that almost nobody ever refers stock trading as gambling. While for most persons it is nothing else.
Predictably gets several things wrong. 1. Gambling is a real addiction. It is quite strange that someone using the term "Addiction Markets" fails to understand this. People who are gambling addicts were gambling before it was legal, they were just getting their legs broken in a way that was non-visible to you. 2. If you ban gambling, the ability of people to gamble online is not reduced in any way. None. The US offsh…
It's hard to take anything you say seriously if you insist on being this disingenuous. You could just as easily say "Liberals care about people being financially ruined and driven into homelessness, but they don't care about you sharing a doobie on the weekend with your bros."
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I'm not saying that we should restrict it. I'm just saying it's not productive or healthy. The difference is that hobbies are fun . Gambling is fun in the same way smoking is fun. It's not, but you have to do it. I know, because I was a smoker. Also, on the topic of morality: morality is stupid. Gambling isn't immoral. Or maybe it is, I don't care. Gambling is self destructive. It can pretty much exclusively only mak…
> morality is stupid least contrarian HN user > only make your life worse Unless you have a family with whom your finances are intermingled. This is like saying alcoholism only makes your own life worse, because obviously your actions have no effect on the people around you, right?
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> the only “responsible” choice is not to gamble online I don't gamble at all in any form, but I still firmly disagree. Some people enjoy gambling in a way that never hurts them-- I've known countless friends and coworkers who talk about doing a bit of it in Vegas or what have you. You're saying every last one is a degenerate gambler somehow concealing it totally from me? They know they're not going net positive on t…
The problem is this: the house always wins. Casinos, online sports books, the lottery, all of it is designed such that all but quite literally a lucky few will lose money. If you understand this properly, then, yes, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it being a form of entertainment , but that means you need to go in thinking about cost per hour instead of any notion of leaving with more than you began with. This…