471–479 of 479 posts
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A couple hundred every couple weeks doesn’t seem that bad for a hobby you enjoy
Good point. I should have included that at the time he really didn't have that kind of money to spend. We were young and he was struggling to even make rent or eat.
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Sounds like a win to me, you can leave more for productive activity to grow and attract more, there less incentive for illegal gambling, and no one is forced to do it. If there’s a massive burden with addicts, you can still impose that the gambling industry pays more to offset.
> no one is forced to do it This logic always bugs me because no one truly lives in a vacuum. People are flawed and generally need help from a community. A small community can't really fight back a well endowed company like gambling companies. The whole(stated) reason android is losing unsigned side loading is because grandmas in SEA are sideloading gambling apps. It's obvious to me that gambling is generally a vulne…
This adds to the burden of finding what to ban, which may be different depending on who you ask.
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Check on that in a dictionary of repute. My own folk etymology of this infelicity is that it started with the mispronunciation, which is actually hard to avoid in rapid speech, and bled over to people simply writing the wrong word. Edit: [in reply to your edit] It is indeed a rather common malapropism.
I think I'm going to keep on spelling it the way I did.
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That's... kinda ridiculous? It sounds like you're just against taxation period. How should a government fund itself?
Zero taxation is just as bad. There's a certain amount of taxation that has to be met, and it's best if it comes from as harmful activity as possible, because whatever gets taxed is discouraged. If there isn't enough harmful activity to meet tax needs, then start taxing normal activity.
Except when the behavior is too common, in which case it will become a relevant revenue source for the government, incentivizing them to encourage the vice. Case in point, here's the Japanese tax agency asking for ideas how to incentivize young people to drink more alcohol. https://soranews24.com/2022/08/17/japanese-government-worrie...
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Does it disproportionately impact men because: - men are still expected to be financial “winners” in relationships - men adopt high risk strategies to accomplish such status - sports are essential to identity and social activity in 2025
That sounds more like post rationalization. Yes sports are essential to identity and that has zero to do with relationships. But gambling is not high risk strategy to become rich. It is basically certainity to loose money strategy. Yes, making gambling part of masculine identity is what many of those ads are trying to achieve.
But these commercials and ads filled with gold, pictures of cash, crowns, and explosions beg to differ! And think how sweet it would be to win, big, on a bet only you know about.
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May I suggest just requiring people to register what how much they want to gamble and then be locked into that. If you want to gamble for 100 usd per month, then you can't bet more than that. You should be able to set your own amount, but any changes should only be active from the next month. This has minimum impact on personal liberty, and will almost eliminate problem gambling.
Problem gamblers will find ways around this regulation. It’ll reduce by adding friction but problem gambling existed before gambling was legalized.
It's one thing to put a slightly higher number and the number box each time, it's another to do identity theft or coaxing your spouse into letting you play as them.
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If you want to restrict advertising on gambling you want to restrict individual liberty. I want to restrict individual liberty. Do you want to restrict advertising on gambling?
Advertising isn’t “individual liberty” — it’s paid psychological manipulation. Banning gambling ads isn’t banning gambling. It’s just stopping corporations from pushing addictive behavior on people who didn’t consent to see it. We banned cigarette ads for the same reason — harm and addiction. Limiting corporate ad power protects individual liberty. I can choose to gamble if I want, but I shouldn’t have to fight off b…
I don't think we can build anything good in the long run if we imagine there's a clear and obvious line between them.
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I think I'm going to keep on spelling it the way I did.
You can do that. And, for some percentage of the population who reads your writing, you will appear under-educated in this matter. It will look like you dont know the right word to use. The other part of the population won't notice.
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These services make a relatively smaller piece of their profit from "responsible" people with a lot of self-control. In many cases, the business is probably not viable without problem gamblers. Problem gamblers account for anywhere from 51% of revenue for sports betting apps, to 90% in the case of casinos [1,2] and the numbers seem to be getting worse. [1] https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/DMHAS/Publications/2023-CT-FIN.…
I got curious and validated your source [1], to pull the exact quote: "The proportion of Connecticut gambling revenue from the 1.8% of people with gambling problems ranges from 12.4% for lottery products to 51.0% for sports betting, and is 21.5% for all legalized gambling." Without going into details, I do have some ability to check if these numbers actually "make sense" against real operator data. Will try to sense-…
- Yes, you can find certain slices of 1.8% of customers, that would represent 50%+ of revenue... But this is usually pretty close to simply listing out the top 1.8% of all accounts by spend
- Therefore, to support the original claim, one would essentially have to definitionally accept that nearly all of the top revenue accounts are "problem gamblers" and almost no one else is... But this doesn't pass a basic smell test, because population wise there are more "poor" problem-gamblers than there are "rich" ones, because there are a lot more poor people in general than rich ones, so it's very unlikely that nearly all of the 1.8% of total population problem gamblers also happen to overlap so much with the top 1.8% customer accounts by revenue.