Americans Increasingly See Legal Sports Betting as a Bad Thing for Society
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Americans increasingly view legal sports betting as detrimental to society, sparking debate about its effects on individuals, sports, and the broader culture.
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Stocks are not that, in general. A particular fraudulent investment could be that. Crypto investment comes to mind.
Also not sure what you mean by winners
https://www.vegas-aces.com/articles/how-betting-sites-limit-...
Various forms of this have been practiced in traditional casinos for almost a century with increasing sophistication, it’s a well-established art by now.
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/against-the-rules
I think this is the ep that gets into the most detail, but I haven't read the transcript.
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/against-the-rules/vegas-spor...
IIRC, if you're too professional or too lucky, the betting apps will restrict you and then lock you out. They only want the dumb money playing.
https://youtu.be/XZvXWVztJoY?t=667
Sports betting is just looking for chumps that have little to no chance of winning.
I think the difference is that buying/betting on a house or stocks are not a zero-sum game. It is feasible for everyone to buy a house, all the houses to increase in real-world value, and everyone benefit. Likewise with stocks. And on top of that effect, the bets being made are useful for society at large to make better plans, because they are a measure of society’s best predictions. Sports betting on the other hand, is truly zero-sum (although I think you could make an argument that it's actually worse than zero sum). Additionally, it is not useful for society to predict which team will win some set of games. This is just wasted effort on a curiosity. There’s nothing wrong with that effort as entertainment, but it is bad to incentivize our minds to take up sports betting, as opposed to say finance, engineering, art, or anything productive.
Hedging is just an additional transaction that limits the damage if the bet doesn't pay off. You can do the same thing in gambling.
Options are a Bayesian game. Jane Street is much more likely to win than I am, but there are still rare cases where I could come out ahead with very high certainty (I know something they don't).
Card counting and being escorted out of the casino aside, there aren't any ways to acquire private information in a gambling context.
Use a respectable platform that doesn't do that then.
*there are small gas fees for sending transactions on the blockchain
There is a risk premium but this premium can be positive or negative. It has been negative in many countries, do you suggest they ban stocks?
I don't think stocks are the same thing as gambling btw. But it is significantly more complex in that they overlap, some financial products clearly exist in the US because gambling was illegal. A sports bet is clearly not an investment, but neither is a ODTE option. Both are entertainment, the former probably more logically so than the latter, I am not sure what appeal that latter can have other than to gambling addicts.
Besides that, there's also the perspective that options help stabilize the market via hedging.
I am also not sure what you are saying. The return on the average stock is negative, it is a empirical fact.
You should only use options as a way to make some extra money for actions you might have taken anyway, such as buying/selling a stock at a certain price.
We could honestly say gambling and investments were similar - if they typically had similar outcomes.
In late 1990s, I set up two customers (in retirement) with PCs and internet. One was a day trader and the other did online casinos. After a year they were both about as good as their contemporaries.
The day trader made more money than he lost but I don't know how much.
The gambler hid his habit from his wife. He lost their entire retirement savings, maxed out their credit cards, got more cards and maxed those out - and took out 2 mortgages on their formerly paid-for house. It ended their marriage.
These truly aren't similar outcomes.
Because your money will at least get you a roof over your head. It's not a bet because it involves an element of chance. I can't believe you're seriously raising such an argument.
Let's start with the obvious- in all forms of gambling the gamblers make a net loss. The games are hosted by very sophisticated companies, that have better mathematicians, and make money.
$x is pumped into the system by the punters, $y is extracted, $z is returned. The 'house' is the only winner.
All those TV ads you see? Funded by losers.
Is it light entertainment? Similar to the cost of a ticket to the game? For some sure. But we understand the chemistry of gambling- it's addictive and compulsive.
If we agree it's generally bad, then what? Lots of things are known to be bad, but are still allowed (smoking and drinking spring to mind, nevermind sugar.)
It could be banned. Would that stop it? Probably not. Perhaps ban advertising? Perhaps tax gambling companies way higher (like we do with booze and smokes.) Perhaps treat it as a serious issue?
All of which is unlikely in the US. Business rules, and sports gambling us really good business.
It's not impossible to beat them consistently, but if you do, they'll limit how much you can bet or just ban you.
Regulate them
There are providers who specialise in providing action to sharps which then sets the prices that retail-facing customers use. If you want to make money, just bet with them. But limiting users is a way to provide a sustainable product. Again, it is an entertainment product, it is not a financial investment.
Also, the quoted text is wrong...gambling companies do not employ lots of mathematicians, I am not sure why people think this...I am not even 100% sure why people think mathematicians are useful, most of the stats used are very basic. But retail providers don't, the prices you see for the biggest lines are provided by third parties, when you make a bet retail providers have no idea what price is being offered to you at that time. The only exception is parlays which are often priced in-house, these lines are very beatable but, again, retail providers limit because the purpose of the product is entertainment. Providers that do business with syndicates do not have lines on parlays because they are so beatable. The protection comes from all users being limited in the amount they can bet on parlays.
A side note is that even in financial markets which are completely open, market makers avoid informed flow. If there was no uninformed flow, there would be no market makers. There has to be an ecosystem. Retail providers exist to buy advertising to win retail users every weekend, to do that they have to run their business in a certain way. There can't be a situation where they just lose money non-stop to fund someone else's business.
Was not that big of a thing 15 years ago. The goal of a ban is not to reduce the consumption to 0, but try to lower it a significant amount. Although, since people are generally aware of it and participated in it, it might not be that easy to go back to beforetimes.
That's the sort of ban that actually works for society, because it is strongly focused on disincentivizing harmful behavior, while shutting out the black market.
I always liked how the offshore casinos would setup a play money casino on their name.net and advertise that on the poker shows. Of course, I imagine a lot of people would put in .com instead and accidentally end up on the real money casino. Whoops.
Phones allow you to gamble from anywhere on anything. You could ban advertising it during sports broadcasts, which would probably reduce things a fair bit, but that's likely to impact the "casual" gambler who
I don't do sports, but occasionally I'm in a pub and they are on. I've seen in the UK over the years how pervasive it is now compared to a generation ago. The advertising companies paint this picture of it not only being normal, but also being the only way to enjoy a game. I'm fairly sure that my parents and grandparents who were big into football enjoyed games quite happily in the past.
In the 90s the typical sports gambling in the UK was old men putting the price of a pint on the pools or in a fruit machine, where you guessed which team would win. The winning limit on the fruit machines was about 5 pints worth, and the pools was a confusing weekly maths challenge while listening to results such as "Forfar Four, East Fife Five"
The explosion of "fixed odds betting" machines which dispensed with the social aspect of going to a pub and spending £5 over lunch in favour of extracting £50 in 5 minutes and moving on, combined with general high street abandonment led to a terrible blight on uk town centres. Online gambling meant you no longer had to go into a seedy shop to hand in a betting slip for the 3:40 at doncaster, then wait for an hour or so in the pub next door to watch it with acquaintances, but instead you could do it all from your own home.
Gambling has become industrialised in the last generation, emphasising the cash extraction and reducing the pleasure it brought. It's no longer £3 for an hour of interest, it's become about extracting as much money as possible (and thus the adverts are all about winning big bucks because you as a sports nerd know far more about which player will score first than the betting companies do)
Conflating fixed odds machines with sports gambling is deliberately disingenuous, it is like comparing a nice glass of water with super skunk weed. Sports gambling is known to have less harm because it is not possible to control many aspects of the experience, unlike with fixed odds machine where the experience is controlled to appeal to addicts. Also, these machines are very heavily regulated, there are categories that separate what places can have them, how the mechanics operate, etc. We have regulation (you seem to be unaware that regulations have changed to limit how much you can wager, you cannot wager £50 in 5 minutes), the problem is purely one of choice.
Online gambling has grown because it is more accessible, and that has meant that a higher proportion of the users are people who didn't want go into a seedy shop and can now put their acca on at the weekend and that is it.
Football pools was also about extracting money from people. The people who ran the pools did not do so because they had an innate love for the human spirit, they did it because people wanted to gamble.
Also, banning advertising would not be a big issue for gambling companies. In the UK, it would be a massive leveller because Paddy Power is able to generate as much revenue as everyone else whilst spending significantly less on advertising. However, the issue is that offshore places would still advertise in the UK and it would significantly incentivize revenue generation from FBOT. If you no longer have big retail participation then you have to rely on addicts to fund the company. This is the first-order effects, past this point it will be different and who knows. But there is an ecosystem that advertising is part of that generates massive revenue, provides significant employment, funds addiction treatment (until 2022, there were no gambling addiction centres funded by the government, it was all funded by providers), and is a generally low-harm product that people enjoy (gambling has been a core part of British culture for decades, what has changed recently is the makeup of British society not gambling).
Modern sports betting seems (to my untrained uninterested eye) to be about extracting multiple bets of £20+ an hour, seemingly competing with the coke dealers which is apparently a very common part of football nowadays for the income, and using similar tactics.
Legalization allows you to generate tax revenue and implement harm prevention effectively for the very small amount of users that are gambling addicts (if you compare to some of the things that are legal in the US, talking about addiction makes no sense at all...weed, for example, is inherently addictive, gambling is not).
Regardless though, when sports betting was largely illegal in the US, the illegal market was by far the biggest sports betting market in the world. Continuing to make it illegal was extremely illogical.
Ease of access and advertising matter.
You do not need legalization for harm reduction. But, the state earning on gambling means effective regulations will be against state interests.
Gambling earns mostly on addicts. Not on people who bet a little here and there. By extension, state will need those addicts existing and loosing money to get taxes too.
Any science on this? That’s a wild statement vs my priors.
Absolutely asinine statement. Yeah no shit it's not going to deter the most degenerate of gamblers of seeking out a place to make bets. Will it stop apps being advertised on TV and the app stores from grooming new people into it? Yes. Will it stop people mildly curious from betting on sports? Yes.
If "it" in "stop it" is "all sports betting" then no, obviously. If "it" is "sports betting in normal society" then yep, it will stop it. Anyone obfuscating this simple fact wants to make money off of more human misery, remember that.
Remind me of how cigarette usage has gone in nations that ban advertisement of it.
If someone is a gambling addict, they are going to do it. One of the issues with gambling addicts in the US before legalization is that they would use illegal bookmakers, and then get their legs broken. Legalizing is the only way to implement a harm prevention strategy because states regulators can control providers (for example, all states in the US have exclusion lists that they maintain and which providers have to implement, regulators have direct control over operations).
In addition, there is also a lot of evidence that if you regulate ineffectively, you will also cause harm. Hong Kong is a classic example where some forms of gambling are legalized to raise revenue (iirc, very effective, over 10% of total tax revenue) but other forms are banned in order to maximise revenue...addicts are the only users of underground services. Sweden have a state-run gambling operator, that operator provides a bad service (unsurprisingly), again addicts are driven to underground services.
For some reason the general public perceives gambling as both inherently addictive and something that can only be triggered by gambling being legal. Neither of these things are true. Substances are inherently addictive, gambling is not, the proportion of gamblers that are addicted is usually around 1%...of gamblers, not the total population. And it isn't triggered by gambling being legal, it is a real addiction so is present regardless.
Gambling marketing, and the gambling industry, facilitate the production of gambling addicts.
When gambler makes debt, then the partner gets half the debt in divorce. And they have to pay it.
It is not bad for families just "by extension". It is directly harming the family members even after the divorce.
The common stuff then splits half half unless there was prenup or something.
Yes, some marriages are "community of property", some are not. Even in community of property though some debts may be on the individual not the couple.
So one cannot really talk in generalities regarding this.
You are right that debt of this type are individual and other parties (spouses, heirs) can't be pursued for it. But it has to be taken into account in a divorce.
Johnny and Janey have a $1m property, $200k savings, $200k retirement between them. They should each get $700k from a divorce (assume they were penniless students when they got together and acquired all the assets during the marriage).
If Janey* wants to stay in the house, she only has to borrow an extra $300k to buy Johnny out. That plus her share of the financial assets, pays for his share of the house.
Now Johnny reveals that he owes half a million in credit card debt that he never told Janey about. She can't just say "That's your problem, it comes out of your share." The marital assets are diminished by that amount before division.
Janey now gets $450k, an even split of the net assets. She has to come up with $550k to keep the house, effectively paying off half of Johnny's gambling debt as well as buying out the difference between the house and the financial assets.
If she doesn't try and keep the house, the cash she gets represents half of the assets minus half the debt. If Johnny owes $2 million, the married couple together are $600k negative. For her to leave the marriage, she has to pay half of this towards Johnny's debts. So she will have to come up with $300k cash to give him, on top of losing all her assets.
Of course, Janey married Johnny for better or worse, and that includes his gambling addiction. But it might feel unfair to Janet, especially if she didn't know about the gambling and couldn't have done anything to stop Johnny running up the debt. And Johnny's lawyer makes sure Johnny dredges up everything he owes in the negotiation, the opposite of the situation with assets where a sharp lawyer might tell Johnny to tread lightly owning up to his gold coins/offshore account. In the worst case Johnny hits Vegas when the divorce seems to be inevitable, knowing that the losses will go into the joint pool, whereas his winnings can be spent on partying or pocketed in cash.
* Divorce participants' behavior is stereotyped by gender. Apologies to all the thrifty houseproud Johnnys and louche deadbeat Janeys out there.
It is even worst - Jane has to pay half those debts even if she dont care about house. If assets minus debt go negative, which they do in case of gamblers, partner is in debt.
That is why the forst advice to partners of gamblers is to divorce asap. Because they easily end up paying for years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
> $x is pumped into the system by the punters, $y is extracted, $z is returned. The 'house' is the only winner.
This is incorrect, specifically with regard to sports betting. Sports betting and poker are both winnable games. Most people don't win in the long run, but unlike in table games (Blackjack, etc.) there are absolutely winners that are not the house.
To be clear, that doesn't mean they're good or should be allowed. I used to be a poker player and enjoy putting some bets on football now, but I've come around to the general idea that sports betting in particular is a net negative for society. Still, if you're going to make an argument against it, it's always going to be a better argument if it isn't built on a basis that's just factually untrue.
Yes some individuals win (at least occasionally.) But as a group it's always a net loss (because the house takes a cut.)
He says "The 'house' is the only winner," which is as a point of fact untrue - there are also individual gamblers who are winners. Saying this implies he thinks that each of the gamblers is a net loser.
Not limited to the US:
prostitution was legal and then it was not and now there is a laissez-faire of some kind in some places, in others there are brothels, in others you cannot, strictly speaking, but in practice it is whatever;
The consumption of alcohol was initially allowed, then forbidden, and later allowed again. Nowadays, some "thought leaders" are again somewhat pushing, if not for regulation, for public condemnation;
Abortion, same-sex sexual relationships, gambling, drugs, they all follow a similar pattern of regulation-liberalization-regulation- (random order), answering to "society" or some prominent voices within or the ever fleeting vibes of the times.
In other words, it does not make, strictly speaking, sense that certain behaviors are regulated or prohibited, and others are not.
Oh, it's worse than that. In sports betting at least, if the gambler consistently makes money, the companies will ban or limit their gains. It's a scam.
Yes. Ban the phone apps and had the ads. Advertising works people, that’s why they pay for it!
I find this one of the most difficult to answer questions about how you should run a society. In practice, we aim to curb the excesses and treat them as if they are illnesses but even that does not stop the damage. In the end it is an education problem. People are not taught to deal with a massive menu of options for addiction and oblivion, while at the same time their lives are structurally manipulated to select them for that addiction.
In the UK for instance, where sports betting is legal (and in some other EU countries as well) it is a real problem. But the parties that make money of it (and who prey mostly on the poor) are so wealthy and politically connected that even if the bulk of the people would be against it I doubt something could be done about it. If it were made illegal it would still continue, but underground. It's really just another tax on the poor.
Sports betting is problematic for the sports too. It causes people to throw matches for money and it exposes athletes to danger and claims of purposefully throwing matches when that might not be the case. This isn't a new thing ( https://apnews.com/article/sports-betting-scandals-1a59b8bee... ), it is essentially as old as the sports themselves.
Smoking is a great example and an almost 1:1 parallel to what's happening with gambling, they had teams of people and even paid off scientists to fabricate studies about the health benefits of smoking, and then used deceptive marketing that was very carefully crafted to ensure people tried it out, and the product itself is just inherently addictive. They ensured they can capture the next generation by specifically tailoring their adverts towards children and getting them curious to try tobacco.
As a result most of the world has banned tobacco advertising, and a lot of places are doing things like enforcing ugly generic packaging with extreme health issues plastered on the boxes, exorbitant prices & taxes on tobacco because of what Big Tobacco did.
Gambling should be treated the exact same as tobacco is and was. Advertising it should never be allowed in any context whatsoever, and the gambling spots and apps should have disclaimers all over the place indicating the dangers of it. Additionally, the actual companies should be heavily regulated to not be allowed to offer "perks" and to also not be allowed to pick who can play or not.
Gambling, like most things, is simply something that will always be a thing, so just like tobacco and alcohol it shouldn't be banned outright. That doesn't mean we need to let predatory practices proliferate. Nothing is stopping us from making gambling as unattractive as we reasonably can, both for the gamblers and the gambling companies. There will still be gambling, but just like tobacco there will be a lot less people doing it, and at that point the ones that are are at least as protected and informed as possible.
Gambling used to be much more restricted in the UK, although horse race betting was always a thing.
Banning gambling doesn’t mean hunting down gamblers, it means stopping them from being in the App Store listings and showings ads in TV.
If you want to find sketchy websites on your own after that - that’s your freedom.
Having 20 year old men bombarded with gambling media is not freedom.
I think there are really three questions bundled in there:
1. At what point is it not really free-will anymore, and more like your brain being hacked?
2. At what point can the government step in to rescue you from #1?
3. At what point can the government step in to defend others from what you do, voluntarily or otherwise?
Since 4-5 years ago I started to notice these betting houses cropping up where my family and friends live. They are impossible to miss, with big pictures of different sports and no windows.
The most important thing to notice is where these place are and are not. They proliferate in working class and less well off neighborhoods, while they tend to be absent from more affluent ones.
These places get a lot of foot traffic, all the locals barely making ends meet, blowing a few tens of euros here and there, with the eventual payoff. It's not difficult to hear stories of people getting into the deep end and developing a real addiction with devastating consequences.
And it's not only the business itself, but what they attract. All sort of sketchy characters frequent these places, and tend to attract drugs, violence...
Legal or not these places make the communities they inhabit worse, not better. I personally would be very happy if family didn't have to live exposed to them.
Gambling is emphasized above to emphasize we are talking about individuals who are not sufficiently skilled to argue they are not essentially partaking in pure games of chance.
Imagine you’re a loan shark. Which of the following seems like a good place to look for customers: upscale restaurant, movie theater, random bar, theme park, baseball stadium, city park, or a sports betting venue.
https://robbreport.com/style/watch-collector/luxury-watch-th...
And people being there to bet wont be buying watches that much either.
That’s not an issue for the loan shark.
The minimal effectiveness of enhanced interrogation plus the desire of the population not to risk being so interrogated means people are generally apposed to such. Tracking down a nuclear threat is considered something of an exception to this stance by the average person.
Either you accept the definition of God-given rights, which is certainly not consistent with your opening statement.
Or you don’t, at which point any following argument regarding its proper usage is moot.
You seem to have gone with the latter, which makes your comment irrelevant. And that is regardless of its truthfulness. To be clear I disagree with it, but getting into that would contribute to derailing the conversation.
It’s a rejection of the idea that people’s list of them would be consistent through time. In 1,000 years people may come up with a list of God-given rights, but it won’t be the same list you use.
As such trying to come up with a list of God-given rights from a human perspective is inherently a flawed undertaking. God is beyond human comprehension.
The idea, moreover, is the generalization of ethics to an environment with multiple actors, such as Earth. And it is, of course, inconsistent with many ethical systems: A competing idea in equally simple terms is “might makes right.”
And the idea, furthermore, does not change over time. So if you substitute it into my previous comment, you will see that the argument within holds.
Finally, and as a side note, I strongly agree that the state of possible actions, and as the “list” of possible infringements changes with, e.g., technology. An 1800s philosopher would, for example, never have considered the applicability of any theory of rights to the operation of a nuclear power plant.
That tipping point isn’t fixed.
> furthermore, does not change over time
Except it does “them’s fighting words” only died out very recently, but it provides a starkly different boundary between my rights and your rights.
Ritualized lethal combat was a thing for very long time, and took an incredibly long time to go away. Trial by combat and dueling grows out of a fundamentally different ethical framework not just a lack of technology. It seems antithetical to Christianity today, but that wasn’t always the case.
Most individuals are going up against these very sophisticated statistical models created by teams of quants working with huge datasets that you have to pay substantial amounts to access. I think most bettors don't know what they're up against.
And the bookie business model is intrinsically anti-consumer: if you win too much then the bookies will ban you. Whereas bookies are quite happy to keep taking money from addicts even when said addicts have already lost their life savings.
They also assign "consigliere" to you if you loose a lot. He is supposed to create a personal relationship with you. If you try to stop playing, that person will try to get you back into gaming.
You are not betting against investment platform itself, you are betring against other people on it. That is major difference.
There are two things you might do as a bookmaker:
(1) Perceive the truth of who is likely to do what, and set odds reflecting that perfect Platonic reality, but with a percentage taken off for yourself.
(2) Adjust the odds you offer over time such that, come the event, the amount you stand to collect on either side will cover the amount you owe to the other side.
You don't need to know the odds to use strategy (2). Nor do you need to reject bettors who are likely to be right.
I don't think this follows. If an individual is winning a lot of money repeatedly in this way, it is a sign that the bookie should give their bets a lot of weight when adjusting prices. But that information is something the bookie might want.
They also typically use off the shelf software for book management and risk.
It was a balancing act though. They really wanted to know what we were doing, but didn’t want to lose too much to us. So there was some give and take / bartering around the fair value of our information in the form of our accounts being banned and limited or bets being voided. But they definitely didn’t want to eradicate us.
Neither does smoking, but we still limit the types of advertisements cigarette companies can make.
Gambling is ultimately a predatory business that serves to separate people susceptible to addiction from their money.
It absolutely does, and the number of people that died from second hand smoke is awful.
It doesn't make sport gambling adverts right, but it wasn't a great example.
We have every right to ban things that are abusive to society.
I’m sure there is an argument there somewhere, and I’d love to address that if you would care to give it another go.
Discussion 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45432627
Since you would be extremely off-topic if you tried to extend this argument to, e.g., Daniel Negreanu engaging in a game of poker, I wanted to explicitly preclude individuals competently engaging in whatever activity is being deemed 'problematic.'
It was mostly to help the 'other side' stay on topic; otherwise, I could trivially refute their arguments by counterexamples, e.g., Daniel Negreanu.
Gamblers have lost their homes as a result of their addiction, I think that impact on their families counts for something.
I.e., no. It counts for nothing.
As guiding questions: What is the difference between negative and positive rights? And what are the relationship to the concept of “God-given” rights?
Gambling between people, a basement poker game, that's fine, that's no one's business.
Handing your money over to rich people operating black boxes that are designed from ground up to mesmerize and mind control you into emptying your wallet is a totally other story. On the individual level, it ruins the lives of anyone who is unable to resist or understand the psychological tricks employed on them. Zooming out, it destroys families, communities and in effect, societies.
If we are going to base the legality of gambling on consent and human rights, we have to recognize the limit where consent is no longer valid, due to sickening engagement tactics.
Someone's freedom to make money off of my ignorance or weakness does not supersede my right to self-determination and well-being, neither of which are possible when being hoodwinked by exploitative capitalists.
If we are to continue allowing corporate gambling operations and 24/7 mobile sports betting, we need to place serious restrictions on how these companies are allowed to operate.
Which is what we should be doing with gambling: no advertising, as opposed to now where everybody ad break has a celebrity endorsing the intelligence you clearly have when you choose (betting platform).
I'm very pro gun, pro freedom of consumption, pro crypto, etc. but once emotional manipulation comes into play, self-determinism goes out the window and people are no longer making free choices.
When addiction is intentionally engineered at a high level and wrapped in the Trojan horse of self-sufficiency or emotion, deceit, or the power of suggestion, we have a problem. Imagine Taylor Swift doing an ad for crack cocaine.
To your implied point, drug addictions similarly ravish communities, destroy lives, and in the case of drugs like fentanyl, legalization effectively makes it easy to acquire extremely potent and discreet poisons, which has a huge potential impact for violence.
We can paint a similar story for gun violence. We can tie drugs, gambling and guns together even more tightly when we look into where cities approve permits for gambling centers, where most liquor stores pop up, selective enforcement and scandals like the Iran-Contra affair [0].
It's important to have a consistent position on all of these topics, so I thank you for raising this point. So all of that said, I think drug consumption/manufacturing/distribution, guns and gambling should generally all be legal at a high level, but we must dispense with the racist and classist implementations of these systems within our societies, and we should have sensible evaluation and certification programs in place for access to different stratifications.
You should be required to periodically prove medical and psychological fitness, as well as operational certification, for certain powerful substances. Similarly, we need sensible restrictions on gambling and guns [1].
The reality is that with freedom comes responsibility. Without responsibility, unrestricted freedom leads to anarchy or a post-capitalist nightmare. One of the main points of government is to balance these freedoms across individuals, communities and society at large, in order to maximize the well-being and self-determination of the people, while allowing for progress and innovation.
I'm curious to hear your own position.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
[1] To be clear, I am very pro 2nd amendment [1] and am not calling for a ban on anything or for the State to maintain a monopoly on violence and power.
"Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary" - Karl Marx
Stranger, some of them want to ban/make it harder to distribute drugs "legally" through doctors (OxyContin, Sackler family scandal) because doctors might be monetarily incentivized, but then they also support complete drug legalization, including for the same drugs (fentanyl). This position is not even internally consistent, in this case fentanyl was "legalized" close to what they seem to demand, just gated by a doctor.
I don't have a clear position, but I don't think I would support legalization of "hard" drugs (anything above marijuana/MDMA). I can't see any positive, the negatives are clear, and it impacts the whole society (I will respect your freedom until it impinges on mine).
I am pro 2nd amendment, but I also believe the State should maintain it's monopoly on violence. Otherwise it's Mad Max world. The way the 2nd amendment is stated (prevent tirany) would not work anyway today, the military power of the State is vastly larger, the "militias" will never stand a chance against Police/Army/Cyber/... So I am pro guns just as far as personal protection requires (so no rocket launchers).
About your last paragraph: How do you feel about other OECD (highly developed) countries that do not allow personal gun ownership (except for hunting and sport shooting (clays, etc.)? Take Japan for example: Except for hunting and sport shooting, ownership of guns is not allowed. How do you feel about it?
But the police must do it's job. Take Sweden, criminality is now rampant there, criminals are using grenades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...
If that is not intentional (which I suspect it is not, so no offense intended), then I believe a quick search on “God-given rights” should help you make whatever case you want to in a logically consistent manner. It is a well-defined concept that has a specific meaning over a specific domain. I get the feeling “negative rights vs. positive rights” might be a useful search phrase as well.
Anyway, you said your argument accounts for it, but didn't actually follow through and demonstrate why that is. How does your argument take into account the aforementioned power imbalances?
It is a well and widely understood term whose usage should not invite “correction”.
Referring to God-given rights invokes their definition, which should make the inconsistency I was referring to clear.
1. My answer is not vague. You are refusing to look up the critical definition. 2. Everything you have brought up (except for the theism bit, which is just completely off-topic) was preemptively addressed in my initial comment.
It’s not that they don’t want to be, it’s that affluent neighborhoods tend to keep things that are considered “low class” out of them. The only Safeway in my city that doesn’t sell lottery tickets is the one in the most affluent neighborhood.
Gambling is basically redistributing money according to a random numbers generator, It's a negative sum game (because the house takes its fee), but a surprise positive spike game. That spike forms an addiction in the less fortunate.
You are marginally reducing their cost of capital.
All finance is indirect. Particularly at small scale.
> Unless you're an early investor or IPO participant
Plenty of IPOs are entirely secondary. And public companies regularly raise money via at-the-market offerings, where a random trader may wind up cutting a cheque to the corporate treasury. (I’ve been a seed investor and IPO investor. My effects on the outcome were rarely singularly meaningful.)
In a large offering, a small IPO investor has about as much direct effect on the outcome as someone buying the pop publicly. In aggregate, however, their actions are meaningful and productive.
Put another way: contrast two economies, one in which most capital is tied up sports gambling (negative-sum game), the other in which it’s in equities (positive-sum long term), one will outperform the other.
MSFT goes up a tiny fraction when you buy. That means MSFT employees with stock grants get a tiny "raise" courtesy of you and with no cost to the company. Microsoft can also use their more expensive stock to make acquisitions. So you are contributing to the company's productive use in at least 2 ways if you buy its stock.
Buying MSFT doesn't meet the criteria to be called gambling, for me.
The big differences are time horizon, addiction and expectations.
The longer the term, the less actively one must watch it and the lower the expected returns, the more likely it’s investing. The shorter the expected turnaround, the more closely one watches numbers go up and down, and the more one is focused on turning multiples than yields, the more likely it’s gambling.
Any stochastic process can produce gambling behaviour. Only a positive-sum game can facilitate investing.
Can you tell me more about this. I've never heard of it before. Is there a theorem?
Now day-trading? I consider that gambling, because any particular day’s price movement is a lot closer to random.
Most can avoid to lose completely while alive, but they have no path to a winning position, and others are trapped in a situation where it's so hard to go down to a net lost that they lose ability to understand that individual hard work and wiseness is not going to defeat societal asymetries.
Which make it no diffetent for average Joe than gambling.
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