I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically awful about sports betting. I do think that the way American corporations have set it up, though, has made it a lot more predatory than many fans want to admit.
Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society
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Re: Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society
#392I see adds for these companies all the time on Muni buses. It’s very frustrating, and I wish the city would be more choosy about who they let advertise.
The system is run so that the corporations are #1 and people just there to feed the economy. That's why sports betting is allowed. Advertising in public spaces is another thing as you've noticed. Those bright electronic billboards are a net negative to society but still allowed. Guess who needs advertising come election time?
Re: Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society
#393Should never have been allowed in the first place, but no one learns from history
It's working as intended. Politics is setup to take from plebs and transfer to lords.
Re: Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you’re establishing a false dichotomy. By and large, poor people are poor because they’re irrational. The businesses that prey on poor people—shady used car dealers, payday lenders, bookies—are exploiting this very irrationality. If we lived in a society where everybody was competent and responsible, none of these businesses could survive. Alas, human beings sometimes have imperfections that leave them vulner…
That take feels lazy. Poverty isn’t primarily about irrationality, it’s about constraints. People make decisions that are locally rational given their options, but the system they’re operating in is tilted against them. If rent eats half your income and your car breaks down, you’re not choosing between “investing” and “consuming.” You’re choosing between keeping your job and getting evicted. Behavioral quirks exist,…
People aren't helpless pawns and they aren't perfect either. There's variability in the human ability to make rational economic decisions, isn't there? So what do you imagine happens if someone routinely makes bad economic decisions?
I don't think this explains 100% of why poor people are poor, but it doesn't explain 0% of it either. And to bring it back to the original point, we need to recognize that certain economic decisions, like sports gambling, are virtually always irrational decisions, and there's virtually nothing to be gained by protecting the consumer's freedom to make those decisions.
You seem to have a load-bearing assumption that in order to care about the poor, we can't even entertain the notion that any of them could ever possibly have become poor as a consequence of their own imperfections. Why is that? It seems obvious to me that when people end up poorer as a consequence of their gambling addictions, the obvious solution is to prohibit or at least more strictly regulate gambling, not to just leave those people to their fate.
> It is propaganda to "other" the poor. It is much easier to blame irrationality for people being poor rather than the systems we choose to keep in place. Those who convinced you of this falsehood, what are they gaining?
That take feels lazy and a little bit like projection. I'm not "othering" the poor, I'm trying to understand at least one of the problems they face and what solutions are possible. And one of "the systems we choose to keep in place" is this recent innovation of allowing online gambling to proliferate and freely advertise on every platform, which directly contributes to gambling addictions, which can and do ruin people's lives. Who stands to gain? The bookies. Yet you're the one arguing that the addict who blows his kids' college fund betting on football is "making decisions that are locally rational given their options", and I'm the one arguing that we should make it harder for the gambling industry to exploit him.
Re: Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m genuinely curious to what extent the hardships younger people face economically are related to wasting huge amounts of time on screens. The average Gen Z person spends nine hours per day on screens. The average 18-24 year old American spends more than three hours per day just on social media. I recognize all the various societal and structural factors that disadvantage younger people. At the same time, people hav…
Hardships do come from high screen time, definitely. The poor job market is not one of them. The “screen” effect doesn’t exist. But the percentage of students enrolled in cs programs grew a lot of the last few years, and I’ve seen the passion difference have an effect. Two friends of mine graduated last year. Both had zero offers out of undergrad (this is the norm right now, again, completely irrelevant to screen tim…
The hard job market drives more screen time. Less jobs, less money to spend at bars or any other third place that has become paid, less money to network. You aren't spending time honing your craft now, you spend times on hustles trying to launch your social media account or by doing gig work on deliveries and rides hating.
You spend more energy than ever making less money than ever and probably under more stress than ever over all the looming costs. That's not a state of mind where you just sit down at the end of the day and start working on your side project. Anyone who can do that is extraordinary, but I hope that isn't how we expect our future generations to operate.
Re: Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do I have a point or is this just victim blaming? A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B so the nihilism is real and warranted, if they don't inherit at least a downpayment for a house from you while you are still alive, the jobs available - even for highly pedigreed people - don't provide the income for the downpayment, for the most part. they would need arbitrage with high paying work in a very low co…
I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I guess one theory, then, of excessive screen time is nihilistic too: if you can’t get ahead, why not spend your time absorbed in an alternate reality, perhaps including alternate realities where you can get ahead, like GTA. That said, what I see in young people around me (because of my age, there’s quite a few) is a lot of addiction, not nihilism. These are kids with opportunities…
>The underlying question behind my post is essentially, does Cal Newport’s theory of success - so good they can’t ignore you - hold?
Sure. But that bar is sky high now because it's very easy to ignore you otherwise. If you're not already running a successful company, releasing some viral piece of media, or publishing some novel research, you're going to be ignored. Having a 4.0 GPA with multiple interesting side projects and even an internship isn't necessarily getting you a job out of college anymore. Or at least, for now. Things you need to do to be noticed basically mean you already have means to somewhat sustain yourself.
Re: Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with this 100%, it's not just gambling it's that the idea there's a steady path you can follow to success has basically disappeared. In a survey[1] asking how much money was required for financial success, Zoomers averaged $10MM, almost double millennials and 10x boomers. A lot of people online took the opportunity to criticize zoomers as out of touch and financially illiterate, but I think most people under…
> $10MM Ah, so they are just basing their life decisions on falsehoods then? lol I know the world is different now, but I graduated high school in the wake of the 08 financial crisis. A lot of this Zoomer doomerism sounds like what people said about millennials. But I (and my future wife) just went to a state school with in-state tuition. Got tech/eng degrees with some debt (5 figures). Have worked in the industry wi…
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Re: Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
By this definition prime loans are also gambling. When you bet on something risky then you are gambling. When you bet on something not risky you are not gambling. Also consider that not investing will generally lose money over time due to things like inflation. If we define the goal to be holding as much value as we can, holding dollars is more risky than investing in many stocks (or bonds, which also have a risk of…
I'm not sure I buy any definition of gambling that depends on the outcome. If you lose money or tend to lose money, then it's gambling, but if you win money or tend to win money, then we change the name to "investing?" Risk includes upside and downside risk.
It doesn't depend on the outcome. If a bank only does prime loans and spreads out it's loans multiple borrowers, has a good reserve ratio etc. and still loses it all, that still wasn't gambling. This is more clear if you consider that storing value in money is also risky. When you get paid in a currency, you automatically begin investing in it at the same time. This is even more clear with foreign currencies. If you got paid $1 million in Turkish Lyra and do not store that value somewhere else, that is more gambling-like than putting it in the S&P. I guess you can say that any time you increase the amount of risk in an investment to get more reward you are gambling. But you can invest in something other than USD with the same risk but with greater reward. For example you can invest it in US bonds (over multiple issues) which has a similar risk to the USD but a greater reward. Still, under such a definition, any business is gambling. We can accept that, but then we have no word that differentiates owning a grocery store from betting all your money on a coin flip, so then the word "gambling" becomes much less useful or really useless in my opinion.
Re: Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just gambling. Influencer and VC culture incentivize this same 'hit it big or die trying' ethos. I have seen '5 million is too little to retire on' type of messaging on HN too. The only way to save more than that is to take on an irrational amount of risk (ie. Gamble). For genZ, the squeeze comes from 3 sides. On one side, few professions promise long term stability. There is a feeling that the ground can va…
I agree with this 100%, it's not just gambling it's that the idea there's a steady path you can follow to success has basically disappeared. In a survey[1] asking how much money was required for financial success, Zoomers averaged $10MM, almost double millennials and 10x boomers. A lot of people online took the opportunity to criticize zoomers as out of touch and financially illiterate, but I think most people under…
Yeah, after doing the numbers, 5M makes sense for my generation. But of course it depends on what "financially successful" means. This isn't defined in this piece, so I defined it as "can myself for a career, save for retirement, and pay off any emergencies". My current yearly expenditures are $60k or so, so if I give a 50% buffer for taxes, savings, and emergencies funds, then take that over a career of 40 years... 3.6m dollars.
And to be fair, my expenditures are very small compared to most others. No loans, no major medical issues, single person living alone. Having a family easily triples this number and we get right on that 10m figure.
The incomes are still wonky, though. I don't know how financial success is double, but income demands are tripled.
Re: Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with this 100%, it's not just gambling it's that the idea there's a steady path you can follow to success has basically disappeared. In a survey[1] asking how much money was required for financial success, Zoomers averaged $10MM, almost double millennials and 10x boomers. A lot of people online took the opportunity to criticize zoomers as out of touch and financially illiterate, but I think most people under…
> $10MM Ah, so they are just basing their life decisions on falsehoods then? lol I know the world is different now, but I graduated high school in the wake of the 08 financial crisis. A lot of this Zoomer doomerism sounds like what people said about millennials. But I (and my future wife) just went to a state school with in-state tuition. Got tech/eng degrees with some debt (5 figures). Have worked in the industry wi…
I don't know. If you're definition of success is owning a home and having a family, it gets close.
you need to clear 1-2m for that house by itself in any mid-high COL area right now.You need another 1-2m in 18 years to take care of your kids (they can live on less, but is that "successful"?). In 20 years we're already talking about 3-4m dollars before we even dive into the other bills and emergencies to address.
We have to remember that "financially successful" isn't some precise term. Some may treat "able to eat food and keep a roof over head" as successful, where others may see "can raise a healthy family" as so.