Nobody saw this coming from three miles away.
I can. Wanna bet on a fiver incoming?
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Oh my! Who knew that legalizing an potentially addictive practice would result in financial ruin of millions?
Legalising gambling is a much better solution than the alternative of back room illegal gambling, loan sharks, enforcers and hit men. Shit it’s not far back in history.
The problem is it needs to be heavily regulated, like: mandatory industry-funded addicts support services, high tax industry, no advertising allowed (including online), regulated opening hours, system-wide self-ban system for problem gamblers, no poker machines anywhere but casinos, etc - you know, things that smart countries do with success.
I think Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale did very well addressing that issue.
Yeah no shit
I unfortunately was part of that machine for a short while. Without going into much detail, I got in right under the c-suite, saw that every meeting was “act now, ask forgiveness later”. The CTO then couldn’t keep his creepy hands off of the employees until I reported him, which caused him to toss me under the bus right before he got fired.
No regrets beyond ever being hired there in the first place.
I’ve managed to cut ads out of my world for 20+ years now; when I accidentally end up seeing some now at a restaurant with TVs or something, the amount of sports betting ads is astounding.
I remember when I first saw them around 2019, thinking to myself: Wait, this is legal now?
Yah, I thought that was illegal. Guess not. Should be.
Prohibition is not the way
OK, bring back cigarette ads.
In my country this sort of bet has become quite popular, too. I wish it became illegal.
I’m glad people can see it as such
Well that’s good, because it definitely is.
I personally couldn’t give a fuck about and like gambling.
That being said, hearing ads 20 times a day about ‘betting in “markets” you didn’t even know about’ (yes that’s the commerical language) is just an extension of wsb gambling and it’s pretty fucked up.
I mute kevin hart every time he shows up. I cant fucking stand the guy. The latest commercial features lebron james, And it upsets me, because so many you men/boys look up to him.
I mute that shit so fast.
I’ve never been into gambling because I’ve looked at the odds. I think it’s only people who think they’ll get “lucky” that waste their money on it. Just use the word gambling rather than betting. For some people it’s a terrible addiction and costs them their futures.
The only time I’ve done any kind of gambling really is back when I cared about Counter Strike more. First, you bet with skins, not money, and I never put much money in. Second, you could actually play it smart because gamblers are stupid. If there’s a team that’s popular, a lot of people will bet on them, and you’ll sometimes get some crazy odds, like an 80+% chance of them winning. In reality, most games are close to 50/50, or they wouldn’t be competing with each other. If you find these games where the odds were broken by dumb gamblers, you could actually win.
With that said, gambling requires money to be lost. The company couldn’t make a profit if people were winning money, on average. They also aren’t just making a profit. They’re making a large profit, and spending a shit ton of money on advertising. Once you take that into account you have to recognize that the players are losing an incredible amount of money to the company.
I was at work one time, and a coworker won $500 on a scratch ticket. I expressed I was jealous when I was working with his buddy later that day. He said, “don’t be, he spends more than that on it a month, he didn’t even break even”.
I mean, they didn’t listen to Australians about Murdoch, why would they listen to them about online sports betting?
Ahem… now do the stock market.
I don’t even like it in my wrestling and that’s like, the least offensive place possible for it to be
I told you betting was haram, bro, I told you!
…
…
THAT is what they increasingly see as a bad thing for society?
The hell?
Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but what Americans think is increasingly not a good guide to take any sort of action in the first place.
That said, I actually salute the real majority of people in the survey that were assaulted with this question and went “the hell are you talking about, get out of my face”. Because yes, the results say 43% responded “bad thing for society”, 7% said “good, actually”, and 50% said “get out of my face” and are the normal ones.
Let this be a lesson not about sports gambling, but about how bad surveys, misleading headlines and moral panics can be used to manipulate large groups of people.
And to be clear, my stance on US sports betting is: get out of my face. I’m more than happy to talk about how the modern online betting industry uses inadequate regulation to bypass pre-existing rules and how this is another vector of the concerns about online regulation of server-side services and their interactions with privacy and censorship.
But “is it a good thing for society” is going in the “get out of my face” column.
Am I understanding your comment correctly?:
-You are upset that Pew Research, probably the most well-known public opinion polling company in the world, did a public opinion poll on sports betting.
-You are upset that the questions were multiple choice and not in essay format.
-You think people who refuse to answer public opinion polls are better than those who do.
-You agree that the modern online betting industry (commonly known as “sports betting” to avoid “gambling” laws) is a bad thing
Not really, no. I am upset at the type of binary framing you are deploying here being present even in well established research institutions to push specific viewpoints.
Like, say, having a study series that in 2022 reports a 57% neutral answer headline that result as “few people think sports betting is good” and following that up several years later with a 50% neutral answer as “Americans increasingly see sports betting as a bad thing”. That’s what you call framing, it’s not supposed to be there, and it may not annoy me much, because this subject is irrelevant, but it does annoy me.
I also take some issue with the wording of the question, if you must know, which is “Thinking about the fact that betting on sports is now legal in much of the country, do you think this is generally…”. I would question why they needed to remind people that this comes from a regulatory change if they weren’t going to report it that way, especially since it forces them to keep the same framing in 2025 when they follow up.
But hey, that’s nitpicking. So is the whole thing. But it’s still a bad headline and a bad way to frame the results. And arguing from authority isn’t going to change that. I’m not particularly impressed or reverent when it comes to Ipsos or Pew’s methodology for these, they aren’t that complicated.
Right, and pro sports influences kids, and gambling makes the pro leagues dirty as hell. So you can think it’s irrelevant, but it still influences your community.
It absolutely does not. I’m not American, so all of that is based on weird, unapplicable, culturally-specific fixations.
Sports betting here has been available under government sanction offline for the better part of a century, it has its own complicated history and the way it interplays with online betting is quite different and has different impacts.
Not that it would matter much, it’s still fundamentally irrelevant. “Will someone think of the children two steps removed from the thing I’m advocating against” is the oldest, dumbest political manipulation tool and this isn’t even a particularly good application of it. But even if that wasn’t a huge stretch… man, in the context of… you know, the current state of the planet, it ranks somewhere next to “do you think there’s more empy air in Cheeto bags specifically these days” in my personal scale of urgency.
children two steps removed
The main market for these apps are 18-25 year olds who are losing a lot of money on it, and like porn I doubt they’re just starting at 18. Even if they are i still consider them kids as there brains haven’t fully developed yet.
Even the younger children are being bombarded with ads for them whenever they watch a game. Watch any American sports game and you’ll see that every other commercial, and every square inch of the screen that’s not the game is for sports betting. Children are very vulnerable to advertising.
Cool.
So most of that post doesn’t apply to the point I’m making because, honestly, the issue is with sports in the first place, so the argument is about sports being trivial and that whole thing is irrelevant anyway.
But I am setting that aside because “young adults are children because it is convenient to the point I’m making and besides I bet they start before they’re 18 anyway and will somebody think of the 25 year old children, and also porn bad” is such an intellectually dishonest argument that suddenly I don’t care that somebody at Pew is annoyed at gambling ads during sports to the point of deploying subtle headline manipulation. I’m more concerned with what you’re on and trying to make you understand why you should make a genuine point instead of wrapping yourself in demagoguery, because maaaan.
sports being trivial and that the whole thing is irrelevant anyway
Do you know what betting is? The point is to turn the trivial and irrelevant into high stakes and relevant. Flipping a coin is trivial, but if you bet $100,000 that it will be heads, then that coin flip matters a lot more.
I didn’t say porn was bad, I was just using it as an example of something kids aren’t allowed to do but obviously do anyway. I don’t give a fuck if children watch porn, that’s actually trivial because most of the time they aren’t losing anything and they arent being bombarded with ads for it everywhere they go.
I stand by what I said about 18-25 year old, especially for young men they’re judgement on risk is horrible and having billion dollar companies exploiting that is wrong. I’m not arguing for Banning it, just for the companies to stop the predatory behavior and ads. In general I think we need to ban all ads for addictive substances / behaviors as it harms those with addictive tendencies.
Yeah, well, I stand by that being disingenuous, intellectually dishonest crap. It’d feel weird giving the mostly technically correct Ipsos/Pew survey a hard time for a shaky headline but giving you a pass for outright manipulative demagoguery, so this is me not giving you a pass.
Both your replies seem very light on arguments and refutations and heavy on name calling, so i don’t think intellectual honesty is something you’re a good judge of.
