Gambling is perhaps the most egregious example of a naked wealth transfer from the poor to the rich
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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Second only to landlording
I love that all of this started when a couple of techbros started illegal fantasy football betting apps, made a shitload of money by further impoverishing the impoverished, then used their ill gotten gains to buy off legislators. Now i am sure they are billionaires, instead of what they deserve which is execution
Uber basically proved you could operate any app outside the law with impunity. Shit rules.
Yeah - the article says "for the dozen states, including Texas and California, where sports gambling is still illegal, the solution is simple: change nothing," but because of these apps, it's trivially easy for Californians to gamble on sports.
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If I ever run into someone that's an absolutist for "let people enjoy things" thought terminating cliches, I am quite likely to point toward sports gambling the way Spongebob pointed at all the dirty diapers hidden around and outside the house.
My response to that is "well I enjoy being a hater".
I often say "let people criticize things" or remind them that the webcomic maker who first said "let people enjoy things" decided that comic was a mistake.
Rare Adam Ellis W
I didn't expect a struggle session or treat defending in a thread about international corporate-scale fucking sports gambling.
What is even left to be leftist about if someone is totally fine with ever-growing sports gambling conglomerates destroying the livelihoods (and even the lives) of individuals and everyone around them while performing one of the most direct poor-to-rich wealth transfers there is?
it's driving me nuts lol. sorry to debatelord but clearly people learned that drug prohibition doesn't work (true) and are drawing a complete false equivalency here.
There's a consistency at its core: "making something illegal doesn't make it impossible, therefore nothing should be illegal, especially if it's a treat I like." 
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Yes
Also, lotteries are horrid and seeing them used to fund basic state functions makes me gag.
I heard somewhere, I wanna say 
that the idea that lotteries fund schools isn't even true.
Like, if property tax generated X dollars for local schools, and then a lottery was introduced that produced Y dollars, instead of schools now getting X+Y dollars, they still get X and you either give Y amount of dollars from the budget to something we don't want to say the lottery is funding, like police budgets or something, since the dollars are all fungible, or you reduce property taxes by Y dollars.
Meaning that generally, what it actually does, rather than providing a new revenue stream for your kid's school, is move the tax burden from the rich to the poor.
Yes exactly. Anyone who supports this kind of thing needs to listen to this one.
And the ads are fucking everywhere. Entire train stations with every square inch of advertising space plastered with Jamie Foxx or whatever washed up scumbag piece of shit actor they could find.
Lmao, I just started listening to this and they immediately compare it to legalizing heroin and giving control of the heroin industry to tobacco companies, with the implication that that would obviously be incredibly bad.
Turns out half the people in this thread think that that's a great idea actually.
Oh my God then they started talking about self-identified socialists now having a libertarian streak and thinking restrictions on people's actions by a Nanny State are bad.
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the betting industry is ruining lives...
I'm glad I dont know a single thing about sports so I can't be tricked into blowing all my cash on the Buccs
I forget the exact stats on it, but gambling addiction is especially destructive to people's lives even compared with other major addictions. Also, on a petty treat-fiend note, it has made sports so much fucking shittier.
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there's a good (extremely bleak) trueanon on this ep 209 , also they recommended a book that sounds great addiction by design haven't read but on my list a while
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I also saw this. I wonder how much the legal gambling also just opened up pandoras box. I think that a lot of people, especially whales, end up on offshore sites anyways because of better odds and less overall rake. And of course there are also underground sportsbooks still for the biggest players, like Shohei Ohtani's former interpreter who got caught gambling millions of stolen money this spring.
And also, even in CA there are "fantasy games" (tickpick, underdog, even jake paul is affiliated with one of them) and there are "social gambling" sites that use the "sweepstakes" loophole, such as fliff sportsbook and chumba casino. These ones, you pay money for a "fun currency" and you also get "sweeps cash" that is basically a premium currency on their site that can be gambled for real cash. But even the off shore sites are pretty heavily advertised on social media, such as stake and bovada.
Regardless of the actual mechanisms of gambling that are available in your state, the prevalence of the advertising is nauseating. Draftkings/mgm/fanduel ads are all over sports stadiums. Beyond that though, some channels, especially ESPN, show tons of actual odds during their broadcast alongside an ad for their own platform, espnbet. The massive influx of gambling money is tainting sports overall.
Im glad my favorite sports franchise has yet to take any gambling ads, but still when they have a game on ESPN i have to put up with the odds bullshit, in addition to everything else that is total garbage about that channel.
Also, players themselves are being harassed on the field and online by people blaming them for a bet that didnt hit. Some players even received cash app requests to pay back a bet that they ruined.
I dont think it will be banned in mosr states, but congress should have the power to at least curb the advertising specifically, because that should fall under interstate commerce.
I live in CA, a state that still hosts a lottery, another form of expooitative gambling that should be banned or severely restricted. No need to have slot machines on paper at every gas station and convenience store.
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I think the question to ask about this is why it's such a unique problem to america. Much like guns.
Here in the UK 15% of men do online gambling and 4% of women. Ok so the top line of data says that 40% of people do gambling but this is only because of scratchcards at petrol stations. When you remove these it drops to 15 and 4.
Why is this situation so significantly worse in america? What is unique about american society and culture that causes 33% of americans to be betting on sports, let alone other stuff?
Supreme court struck down a law banning sports gambling in 2018 on the logic that "illegal gambling is already happening, might as well make it legal and cut out the criminals!". The now-legal betting companies started pushing a non-stop torrent of pro-gambling ads immediately.
Australia is also pretty bad, see below:
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making gambling illegal is harm reduction.
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