I think one day we're gonna look back at all the broken lives and immiseration caused by letting sports betting conquer the entire world and wonder how we could have been so foolish as to allow it
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Profiting off the misery of the working class is what late stage capitalism is all about. It's not even "bread & circuses" anymore, just outright thievery
It will eternally frustrate me we wasted years talking about the imagined dangers of video games when the science never supported it, but modern science and millennia of basic cultural understanding say unchecked gambling is a plague on society.
I've worked a few gambling-adjacent jobs and I have never seen such a miserable clientele or as evil an industry and I have trouble comprehending how it captured most of the state and federal governments. It will be a health crisis.
Former soccer "fan" here, betting sites sponsoring our local league destroyed my interest in it and have put a smudge of unfairness that is causing violence in the stadiums. International entities like FIFA or CONMEBOL are destroying the game to please powerful sponsors like them and ME royalty
I feel like every 5-10 years there's some new horrible scam perpetrated on the American public with far reaching consequences for the victims but none for the perpetrators.
We say this about a lot of things but what actually happens is we get used to it and accept all the negative externalities as something that just happens.
I have an app on my phone that let me put $300 on us not doing that, and a $25 dollar prop bet that the first congressperson who tries gets made fun of on SNL.
And that all these guys who have become spokesmodels/shills for this nonsense will one day be viewed like the many actors who were shills for cigarettes back in the day. Guys like Gretzky, or Jamie Foxx. The pay day must be amazing, but jesus, how can you possibly ignore the societal impact?
It fits in perfectly with the style of the American economy which is to create businesses that have little economic value aside from transferring wealth into the hands of a few who control access to something. And the problems that arise are considered public externalities that society will ignore.
I spoke to a CEO of a betting company recently in the context of 2FA services and he said pretty casually that Christmas is a peak traffic period for them and as far as bleak corporate moments go, that was one of the bleakest
Not to be the "But in Europe..." guy, but the shit was legal over there for a long time and it wasn't this huge disgusting thing. It's the apps. You gotta have to go to a place that, importantly, *is not where the game is played*. Having it in your pocket and at the arena is the disgusting part.
I'm not so sure that even "going to a place" solves a lot of the problems, this review of an academic book looking at the effects of betting shops in the UK is really scathing and was eye opening for me:
I just mean you can't treat every sports stadium like a dog track or every sports stadium will become a dog track, especially football ones. Having to make your bets before you go in puts up a buffer that protects other people and yourself, and if you want to keep doing it you have to leave.
Not just the apps -- shit started getting bad in Europe when it was web-only and nobody had smartphones. It was the kind of bets that became routinely available online, prop bets in particular.
a bookie somewhere else is not good, but it's also nowhere near as bad as having a bookie constantly in your pocket that is always open and always being advertised to you
it should be illegal to advertise sports betting at a game or on a broadcast of one. the announcers should definitely not be encouraging prop bets. i feel like i'm the crazy one for saying this
The announcers jumping into an ongoing game to tell viewers to make a prop bet is the worst thing I've seen American media do in my life. It's almost like cigarette advertising, except if every time you had a smoke your checking account was debited five dollars.
They're going to turn gambling into guns, wherein the thing itself is not necessarily the problem, it's people who can't control themselves not being prevented from access and innocent bystanders not being protected in any way by their government bc of captured legislators and industry lobbyists.
This feels like the best way to pop the balloon (past just re-outlawing that shit entirely). So much of the encouragement is that the sports are getting fat sucking off this teat. They've made a deal with the devil.
Of course that also means it's going to be a knife fight to legislate.
Honestly, the fact that drug companies are allowed to advertise on television should have been your first indication something had gone catastrophically wrong with the United States.
unironically become a hardline anti gambling person (as in, punish all companies that enable it, don’t punish betters). it’s so fucking destructive, especially the machines
cannot recommend this video about the design of gambling machines enough: excellent channel overall, but this is so enlightening as the practically demonic way they work https://youtu.be/jQIHqkudgNY
A year or two before it was legalized, a guy I went to high school with was arrested after a half hearted bank robbery attempt in order to pay off gambling debts.
We certainly don't need to advertise it, or have it animate every sports show that exists, but I don't know if illegal is better.
it’s an interesting contrast to marijuana, which has been slow and while not inconvenient you can’t just get it at 7-11. this has just been turning on all the taps at once. or to cigs and booze, which there are strictures on advertising
I'm paraphrasing this from somewhere I can't recall, but: I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by spending their lives and intellect making advertising more efficient
it'll be like the urbanist realization, "oh shit, maybe bulldozing a quarter of our most valuable land so it could be stuffed with pollution spewing deathmobiles was kinda stupid"
Ugh, we let our kid have some YouTube Kids before we realized how bad it all is; it’s almost impossible to completely walk back 100%, but we’ve limited it a lot
My YouTube Kids setup is nothing but Ms Rachel, Sesame Street, Yo Gabba Gabba, Bluey, Curious George, & Blue's Clues. I literally can't count how many Cocomelon & Blippi-type accounts I had to block to make this happen, & even then it's always lurking the moment you start exploring further
i don't know how long I can keep my finger in the dike on this one but my kids know that YouTube is "something we don't watch." I used a downloader to get them selected stuff sometimes (they love cosmic kids yoga)
Both of these things have accelerated the upward distribution of wealth into fewer & fewer hands, so of course they're allowed.
Billionaire-owned media keeps the average person ignorant of the true causes & costs of problems. Social media got around those gates for a while, but....
The line between investing and gambling has always been fuzzy but I can't think of many previous eras where "slow and steady" has so thoroughly lost cultural relevance relative to "chase big paydays".
It’s insane how the ads have gotten. I’m so thankful the one vice I’m not into is gambling. I would be broke if I gave it a shot n had a couple good days to get me hooked. I won’t even buy lotto tickets I’m so scared of getting addicted. So many people drop like $200 on scratchers at my local 7/11.
Like how much of our economy’s dollars have gone from real industries like food or construction into stock markets, Bitcoin, gambling, scams, predatoy lending, etc. the junk has to be like most of our economy at this point.
Many things that don’t look like obviously terrible ideas have unexpected bad outcomes; making gambling ubiquitous and inescapable was never in that category
Almost every day, and definitely every night, the trending list on that other platform is almost only sports topics and athlete names, no matter what news or cultural trends have taken place that day. Hard not to believe it's all being paid for and promoted
I'm no paternalist but this shit ... this shit is very bad, because we simply don't have a culture around the immediacy and pervasiveness of being able to do this shit on your phone.
I would take rampant sports betting over them being a recruiter for the armed forces like they are. And as far as puritan morality laws, I'd take the gambling over the alcohol consumption as well. Gambling rules tbh
And supposedly because lotteries and scratch-offs weren't generating enough state revenue off of gambling addicts and people desperate for any financial relief.
Same in UK, sadly
Commercial TV channels full of those adverts - their revenue is down so suppose they feel they can’t afford to be choosy
BBC doesn’t have adverts here but there are still logos on sports teams about
If we only knew ahead of time the deleterious effects gambling can have on susceptible populations. Alas, there is no way to know, no way to find out, and nothing we can do. We must let the free market decide for us. For reasons. For money. Money is the reason. It’s only natural.
My least sexy political opinion is that we need massive gambling/lotto reform and it’s the one most likely to get me shoved into a suitcase if I get any power
It's no fun to be against it, but it is genuinely one of the worst things imaginable. A nightmare for virtually everyone. A legalized mob outfit breaking people, ruining families, stripping the meat from the american carcass
fucking tricky too cause it’s one of those things you can’t outright ban without creating a huge black market but you do have to do a lot of restrictions (no advertising would be a good start) and lots of harm reduction ideas floating around
I remember reading years ago about a successful program in South Africa to increase the number of people with bank accounts. Instead of getting your pennies in interest every month, they bundled everyone's pennies together and like one or two got the whole pot. Massively successful.
It was entirely predictable from what happened in the UK and Australia -- or things like the spot fixing cricket scandal -- but there was just too much money to be made from it.
I like putting 10 bucks on the Bucs but the instant mid game prop betting and junk should absolutely not be permitted
what possible purpose is there for allowing betting on individual pitches being balls or strikes on my phone from anywhere other than taking advantage of problem gamblers
I actually think this accessibility is tempered by the fact gambling apps remain weirdly difficult to navigate for newbies. This whole “can’t cash out till your purse is full” type stuff makes it 20x more complicated.
Maybe. But if I make a bet I want an immediate payout if I win otherwise I don’t get the point. I feel like a lot of ppl are more one-off gamblers like that, for when the mood strikes.
I've become far more gambling skeptical over the past 10-15 years. Not entirely sure what to do about it though -- maybe something like "you have to be in an actual casino to do it", to make it less impulse-driven.
Watching commentators advertise the odds during the game is annoying. I just wanna watch the game, I don’t need to know my payout if I put 20 on Jokic finishing with 30 points.
I love that I am so ignorant of Big Sports Ball Stuff that I had no idea this had become such a problem until I saw this thread.
But also kind of sad, as it's because of the demise of the old Deadspin, which I visited from time to time despite my lack of interest in sports ball stuff.
Dipping into the sports ball comments whenever I was there for gymnastics, corruption, or comedy was an enjoyable & valuable reminder that not all Sports Ball Dudes were like the ones commenting on Barstool & ESPN, & that kind, funny, thoughtful, feminist men were in these spaces too.
I haven’t watched sports in years and years but saw a couple games in hotel and airport bars last year and I think I said to my buddy something like “Pete Rose could use DraftKings and nobody would know or bat an eye”
In retrospect, it's going to be like the AIDS crisis or the opioid epidemic, a massive lapse in judgement by everyone in power or with authority that led to a lot of societal and individual harm.
I'm a high school teacher and quite worried about how widespread sports betting has become among my teenage students. I think at least some of it is with fake money the apps give you when you sign up and can't ever withdraw as real cash, but they're still getting hooked, and at younger than 18.
The only thing stopping me from developing the $500 per year habit is it's not yet legal in my state, If I could just download an app, put money in with a reasonable expectation I could at some point take winnings out I would be using it right now.
I did bovada a couple years ago and it was so fun, I had a $200 deposit last me like 9 months, gambled weekly, then I realized turning bitcoin back into cash is a huge hassle, and it lost it's luster.
Apparently they're putting sports betting kiosks in grocery stores here in Ohio. I think I preferred it when gambling was just controversial enough to not have it shoved in everyone's faces.
Honestly, it is just like utterly disgusting and disgraceful how much betting has taken up swarm across the US over the past years, and how much its just been *embraced*
Christ, if I was a US Senator or Representative I'd be 100% championing and trying to get some kind of fucking new committee on this to deal with this shit
It's completely inevitable that there will be a massive scandal in a major sport in the relatively near future. How could there not be? Internationally this kind of thing has already happened in soccer and tennis. But just wait until somebody fixes a Super Bowl.
An NBA ref admitted to betting on big games he was officiating and did like a year in federal and everyone else just went “hmm weird” and never spoke of it again!!
As a ten years sober recovering alcoholic who’s continued to watch my whole family slowly kill themselves with alcohol, I can tell you: People gonna do what people gonna do regardless of hoisting stigma upon them for their destructiveness.
There's vastly more gambling happening now than 10 years ago, and that level was vastly more than 10 years before that. It wasn't about stigmatizing gamblers, it was about regulating gambling (and, a little, stigmatizing the industry). Nobody was shamed for going to Vegas, but the industry was shady
What was it Gregg Easterbrook used to say? Something about the way he squared his religious upbringing with his more modern sensibilities was to be pro-toplessness but anti-gambling?
jorps, it's fascinating (and bad!). i really suggest picking a football show and watching it--there's a chance the whole show might be about gambling though now. like, really, take in 30 minutes of a big football show. the betting is insane.
This, but with pretty much every form of speculation that makes a handful of people much wealthier by design and at the expense of the common man. Stock market? Housing market? Cryptocurrency? NFTs? All of it scams and bullshit that we’ve allowed to exist for inexplicable reasons.
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ha ha ha ha anyway
I even looked up a list of states where sports betting was legal and they even referenced 'say it ain't so, joe'
But it should absolutely be regulated, discreet, and advertising it should be banned/outlawed/illegal.
Of course that also means it's going to be a knife fight to legislate.
...to gmbling in general, not just this crap.
We certainly don't need to advertise it, or have it animate every sports show that exists, but I don't know if illegal is better.
Billionaire-owned media keeps the average person ignorant of the true causes & costs of problems. Social media got around those gates for a while, but....
Politicians open the gate willingly for people who open their checkbooks
Commercial TV channels full of those adverts - their revenue is down so suppose they feel they can’t afford to be choosy
BBC doesn’t have adverts here but there are still logos on sports teams about
what possible purpose is there for allowing betting on individual pitches being balls or strikes on my phone from anywhere other than taking advantage of problem gamblers
the app: did you know that every 15 seconds you can place a new bet
But also kind of sad, as it's because of the demise of the old Deadspin, which I visited from time to time despite my lack of interest in sports ball stuff.
C.M. Burns knew the score 30 years ago. Surprised it took the real world this long to catch up.
I don’t think the politicians will address this while it keeps the masses calm and entertained.