ProPublica had one of their reports work with gambling addition experts to see how DraftKings would respond to someone presenting signs of a gambling problem. It's a hell of a read, and makes it clear that this company is full of people with absolutely no ethics whatsoever.
People in companies that are a negative public good are by definition unethical. I'm not surprised by anything they do. The real problem is how we've let these companies infiltrate so much of our society so fast. I can't consume any ad supported media without getting some ad about them. This company really defines the phrase "money talks"
Yet I keep getting ads in Spanish on Amazon Prime video and nobody in our household understands that language. We don't listen to Mexican polka music or watch telenovelas with subtitles, we don't have Spanish-speaking help, there is literally zero Spanish in our house. And it's not Spanish-only ads, it's usually big telco (T-Mobile now, some other before) or car ads, which sometimes run in English version. The list at the link is primarily a collection of the random facts from reviews for me, so it knows a lot about my cats but not much about me. Feel pretty comfy if this is the SOTA of adtech.
Live in a house, there are some Mexican polka aficionados driving their low-riders down the street (I live in Texas) but it only reaches inside as base. Even if Amazon could have found the music they play by matching the rhythm, it does not look like a smart decision to target Spanish ads on this basis. Other than Prime Video, which I don't use quite often, I subscribe to Audible and Kindle, with perhaps 1000 of titles between these two. None in Spanish.
Spotify has the same issue (they play ads in podcasts despite paying for subscription) but I don't know if their ads are just local ads made in Spanish only (I live in Texas) since I have no clue what they advertise. They also play ads in what I believe is Canadian French because it does not sound quite like French (which I also don't know but can understand a bit better than Spanish).
You actually made me look: according to Wikipedia it was brought by a Mexican Emperor, Maximilian I (former archduke of Austria, brother of Franz Joseph of the World War I fame). Don't care about this kind of music but somehow I never learned that Mexico had not one, but two empires among other things between the modern federal state and a Spanish colony.
I wouldn't be surprised if they actually filtered those out of your ad target model. Most people don't care if advertisers know they like cooking, but not so much their fetishes
That wasn't really alarming to me, "Likely reads diverse literary fiction." Nice.
But what _was_ alarming was this persistent banner on the page: "Your other AI assistants have learned about you. Bring that knowledge here for an even more personalized experience."
Okay...so let's click *Import* and see what this is all about...
Step 2: Log into your AI assistant and paste it in.
(?!, okay, let's see what we get...)
Step 3: Paste AI assistant's response. Submit the response from your AI assistant below. We will remember the information you share to improve your experience across Amazon services. *To protect your privacy, we may not save all of the information you submit.*
How about...don't do this at all, or at the very least, please ask users to review the returned response for things they might not want to share with Amazon.
What a strange, hokey, non-vetted, and privacy-violating feature...
I pulled that info from a full export of my Amazon data and...
"Customer indicated they are currently in the Pacific Ocean" - "Amazon has medium confidence in the validity of this memory"
Well, then. I guess trying to break Alexa for Shopping by telling it I was in the middle of the English Channel really broke my "about you".
I also had managed to update my About You in weird ways - I got it to accept some kind of variant of "is a gold rewards subscriber of Jeff's Benzos powered by PillPack" and it agreed that was a valid service when I later asked it and guardrailed itself at the same time:
Our representatives both dem and republican (but slightly more Republican) have decided that the mountain of data that for profit companies have on is a benefit overall to the economy and we’re the guinea pigs for psychological experiments - the “American consumer” is the #1 commodity the US mines.
Which would shed all those grand visions from tech tycoons about a fully UBI-financed "pure consumer" economy in a different light: "We couldn't care less about jobs, but guinea pigs - we need lots of those!"
You're diluting responsibility with this comparison and it doesn't help.
You're trying to compare the people who actively build and support these platforms knowing full well what they're doing, with the people who go to vote for lower taxes or more jobs... oh and this hidden lobby agreement to not hurt gambling platforms. If you as a voter think these two things are at the same level by all means, call yourself a shitstain and I won't get in your way.
But nobody votes on these matters, they just come bundled (and hidden for 99.99% of people) under the broad political agenda of a handful of elected representatives who mostly focus their platform on economy, military, etc. not betting sites. This isn't any candidate's platform header. The voter is at best ignorant to these hidden issues. And even if voters did vote on this directly, it's not an obligation for anyone to actively support and contribute.
People choose to build and support platforms which are 100% harmful for anyone but themselves and the shareholders. And they should be chastised. They're free to build whatever fits their moral values, we should all be allowed to criticize according to ours even if you think the blame should be spread across 150 million voters for whatever reason.
The gambling platforms are a new thing in the US, voted on at each state in the past few years. For example, in california it was a proposition back in 2022 (proposition 27 i think, which was defeated thankfully). Several states put it directly to vote.
We are responsible, and it doesn't appear you have any understanding of how it all came about.
The real problem is how we've let these companies infiltrate so much of our society so fast
- Glass stiegel repealed
- Automatic weapons ban lifted
- Sports gambling ban lifted
- Many more
All the hard work of the people who suffered and fought to achieve this wisdom only for it to be abandoned.
Generations making the same mistakes over and over even with boundless knowledge at our fingertips. Really showcases how important education and especially reverence for education is.
Prediction markets seemed like a possible exception to the rule that anything to do with betting is always a scourge on the commons, but those companies quickly realized sports gambling is the best way to rake in cash, so they all converge on it.
I am one of the very few people in the United States who actually does still earnestly believe prediction markets do in principle serve an immense social good that can't be provided in any other way: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq
Just, in practice, Polymarket and Kalshi are (unsurprisingl)y run by people who solely care about how much revenue they could ever possibly inhale.
And everything else about them is so unethical and so destructive to the commons I would support them being metaphorically razed to the ground.
Like, just the Kalshi and Polymarket Twitter accounts alone contribute more to disinformation (disinformation, not misinformation) than Alex Jones could ever dream of. And then all the accounts affiliated with them make it 1000x worse. And then they have so many other unbelievable scandals I'd have to write a wall of text to list them all. Tons of egregiously machiavellian, intelligence agency-tier tactics and operations.
The only prediction markets that seem to be mostly upside with minimal downside are the ones that do not accept real money.
I've always wondered if you could solve most of the negatives by imposing a "money in per year" limit on online gambling. Let's say, you can only transfer in 1000 dollars per year or something; maybe it's a federal limit tracked to your SSN or required to be declared on your tax forms or something. You can of course transfer OUT as much money as you win, and carry over any earnings to next year without affecting the limit. But aside from people for whom 1000 dollars a year is a huge deal, you avoid the worst harms. The people who benefit the most and eventually become disproportionately represented in the pool are superforcasters who can consistently turn a profit by being smarter and better at predicting stuff than everybody else.
An idealized prediction market could be a social good the same way a frictionless spherical cow is good for making my physics homework easier.
There is no way to remove the incentive for people with the ability to alter the events being bet on. Insider trading is generally considered a bad thing for the stock market because of the non symmetrical information for everyone trading but all of sudden in the past few years a cohort of people(rationalists) have found it virtuous
I think the thing is insider trading genuinely is exactly part of how prediction markets contribute something that was not offered before: a more accurate way for the public to gauge the probability of future outcomes. I, as a rationalist, think there is a lot of good that results from that.
It just happens to almost always be the case that the bad greatly outweighs the good, and it usually just leads to things like brazen war profiteering (+ plan-leaking that jeopardizes operations, in the event the military operations were perhaps for a morally net good cause).
They know they are rational because they are rationalists. If they decide an idea is good it must be rational.
Before any of their defenders(and I’m including e/acc and most of TESCREAL in this criticism) come at me about how much introspection they do and how they constantly try to question their theories or be LessWrong you’ll have to explain things like prediction markets, Bankman-Fried, or the litany of other warped ideas coming out of this group that are causing harm to society.
An insider doesn’t make their bets known until they are certain they can take advantage of it. The whole point of the move is to predate on the rubes.
In all the cases of insider trading I have been aware of, I have never once heard this argument, until that interview with a prediction market CEO.
The whole point of insider trading is to ensure an unfair trade. The moment you enshrine unfairness as a core tenet of your market place, it loses price discovery capability, ensuring that the surplus is captured by manipulation not performance.
You are empirically correct, but one could likely design a prediction market that resolves this while still making insider trading an informational public good. Unfairness to counterparties is a different axis from non-monetary public forecasting signals.
Because it’s targeting gambling addicts as the rubes.
When you have shit like will the government attack X nation by 9:00 pm on Friday, it takes very little for the insiders with levers to decide if the event in question is going to happen, to make the event happen.
It’s beyond even regular corporate insider trading which was usually predicated on secret information, not the literal ability to decide if an event occurs.
Gambling is for games of chance, while one can "beat the house" in prediction markets simply by being more intelligent, informed, and better at forecasting.
I wish the ads were restricted to ad-supported media instead of arriving in the mail. I don't know what better evidence I need to avoid them than by how fucking aggressive they are about finding new suckers and offering money to help grease the slide into gambling addiction.
This falls under the umbrella of "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism". Everything you do supports somebody who's doing something bad. There's really no way to avoid it. Heck, it was even a plot point on The Good Place.
The issue is that our economic system is coercive. You need a job. Now this doesn't excuse you from doing any job but you also need to live.
Take the big tech companies. They're essentially military contractors now. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc are functionally no different to RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
But should you treat someone who works on Android the same as someone who works out on AI systems for military targeting? Probably not. Also, Palantir is fundamentally more evil than any of these tech companies. So it's tricky.
I do agree that online gambling as a whole is deeply unethical. There is no positive byproduct of this. Your salary is paid by people losing money, probably through addiction. And yes, you can say people have free will but you're still preying on and growing addiction.
One that isn't built on debt bondage and a massive wealth transfer to the old and wealthy. Student debt, housing debt and medical debt are all designed to keep you a complaint worker who will increasingly never escape that debt. We have increasingly just replaced the dukes and kings of old with centibillionaires. Together we're bouldering towards what many of us call "neofeudalism".
This is one thing that Karl Marx and Adam Smith agreed on: landlords are parasitic that reduce economic output. It's another way we're returning to a virtual aristocracy as land gets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
This is all going to further fall apart once we don't need everyone to be employed. Arguably we're already there. What are the rest of the people meant to do? Starve and die? At some point you realize the only way forward is to collectively own the wealth you help create.
We will eventually reach the point where not everyone needs a job. Many basic functions of life like agriculture and food production will be automated. Construction will probably be automated.
AI is being used to reduce the labor pool to suppress wages. You not only save on wages for laid off people but the remaining workers need their jobs and won't be asking for raises. They'll probably be doing extra unpaid work to boot.
If 20% of the workforce is no longer necessary, society as it stands now will collapse. That's the point.
> This falls under the umbrella of "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism".
No it doesn't. There is a time and place for the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" mantra, but increasingly (as is the case with your comment) it is being deployed as piece of whataboutism to distract from clearly unethical behavior by implying it is no worse than anything else. There's actually a massive difference between businesses which have complicated tradeoffs in the means of delivering what is basically a social good, and facilitating sports gambling, a negative-sum activity which ruins people's lives for basically no upside whatsoever.
(It's deeply ironic that a slogan originally coined by socialists has found its most use by capitalists trying to get off the hook for their actions, but I guess most rebellious anti-establishment sentiments are ultimately co-opted for profitable ends.)
Is any form of entertainment or art a social good?
People can get "addicted" to practically any type of entertainment in that they spend a massive chunk of their time on it to the point it stifles their development.
Is sports gambling worse than f2p games? Are f2p games worse than regular video games? Is someone addicted to video games worse than someone addicted to reading fantasy novels? What about smutty novels?
I'm not sure is disagree with you but I think it is hard to start drawing these lines without saying you are now the arbiter of good art and bad art and you can ban some forms of art if you don't like them and have decided they are bad.
Now are you just banning things you don't like because you point to the societal harms as a fig leaf defense that could be applied to the art you do like as well?
Luckily all those companies have done tons of research to exactly qualify and quantify exactly this. Those companies don't seem to have problems identifying those addictive mechanisms, why should the government?
> I'm not sure is disagree with you but I think it is hard to start drawing these lines without saying you are now the arbiter of good art and bad art
There's a super easy line to draw actually and it has nothing to do with art
Are you selling a product or an experience?
If you're talking about someone addicted to fantasy novels or video games, they are addicted to products.
If you're talking about someone addicted to opening Magic the Gathering booster packs, or videogame loot boxes, or sports gambling, or prediction markets, they are addicted to experiences. In the case of loot boxes they are experiences shaped like products but the addiction is about the experience of opening the box, not really whatever is inside
So.. easier than you seem to think
Of course once lawyers get involved they'll quibble over this shit until the sun goes out
Is selling a ticket to a movie an experience, or a product? Is a subscription to netflix a ticket or an experience? What about a subscription to world of warcraft?
If you paid for world of warcraft by the hour does that change if it is an experience or a product?
This doesn't really work because products and experiences have too much overlap.
What you are really against I think is the different ways in which we are gift wrapping a skinner box, but there are an infinite number of ways to wrap it that will bypass your specification system.
Is any form of entertainment or art a social good?
People can get "addicted" to practically any type of entertainment in that they spend a massive chunk of their time on it to the point it stifles their development.
Is sports gambling worse than f2p games? Are f2p games worse than regular video games? Is someone addicted to video games worse than someone addicted to reading fantasy novels? What about smutty novels?
I'm not sure is disagree with you but I think it is hard to start drawing these lines without saying you are now the arbiter of good art and bad art and you can ban some forms of art if you don't like them and have decided they are bad.
Now are you just banning things you don't like because you point to the societal harms as a fig leaf defense that could be applied to the art you do like as well?
Is it the % of people who show addictive tendencies to a piece of art/entertainment how we define if it is good or bad?
Is the morality of a form of entertainment defined by how many users show problematic consumption habits, such that in some populations an entertainment product is a moral good and in others it isn't? Is morality that flexible?
I agree with that, but if you don't have a coherent set of rules for why we are doing what we are doing, you just become an arbiter of right and wrong that can't be questioned.
Which is a whole lot like saying your preferences are legal and if you don't like something you can arbitrarily make it illegal because you dislike it and therefore it is immoral. That kind of rationale could be used to ban television or videogames outright.
Do any of these industries maintain dossiers on the psychological fault lines of their victims so they can screw them out of extra cash until they're either insane, bankrupt, or both?
So if they didn't keep those dossiers would that make them an ethical sports gambling company even if a high percentage of their users showed problematic usage patterns?
To give you some perspective. When I was in drug rehab beside people addicted to substances there was a handful of people with gambling problems. And it was very clear that those are the same kind of issue even if delivery mechanism is different.
Gambling rides on the same pathways that make substances fucking with dopaminergic system addictive.
They don't get physically ill if they stop gambling to the point of needing hospitalization for the extreme pain it causes.
They don't have to gamble even when they don't want to in order to stave off getting very sick.
medications that are addictive for real vs really wanting to play a game and feeling the dopamine urge....
They aren't the same thing at all, because one of them is something you want to do, and one of them is something you maybe don't want to do but you need to do it because the consequences of not doing it are so extreme.
You’re drawing a line between physical and emotional/mental addiction. You are correct that they differ. That doesn’t imply one is not an addiction. It’s similar to comparing the levels of Maslow’s hierarchy.
The difference between gambling and any other compulsion or addiction is that only gambling can leave you broke and destitute in a single day, without regard for starting wealth. Maybe findom, but going completely broke is generally not the purpose.
The difference between drugs and other addictions is that (certain) drugs greatly increase the risk of death.
So I say let's divide it in two - addictions that can kill you or leave you in financial ruin in a single evening, and those that cannot.
f2p games and tv shopping network addictions absolutely leave a significant number of people destitute.
There are many other hobbies/forms of entertainment that can easily consume significant resources and leave some % of their userbase in serious financial trouble/ruin their lives.
Also you seem to want to define whether a hobby/form of entertainment is moral or immoral based on how expensive it is. So if a slot machine had a lower max bet it would become moral?
F2P games can absolutely be made to exploit the same mechanics as real gambling, and are often designed to do so. But no matter what they do, they're just not as potent as real money gambling. The pull isn't the same when it's not done with real cash, they tend to be less ruthless and it seems that a smaller proportion of people is potentially susceptible to F2P addiction compared to real gambling. For the right people, they can be very wallet-draining but it doesn't seem many go into homelessness like with gambling.
What's a "TV shopping network addiction"? I tried searching it, and I can only find isolated news articles from 5-15 years ago that report on it purely because of how unusual this is. Going to file this under 'people can get behaviorally addicted to anything', what a strange example. Do you even know anyone who has bought anything from a TV shopping network, let alone a 'significant number' that are left destitute?
The reason why people disagree with you is because the hair-splitting between different types of addictions seems very pedantic. Clearly people think that gambling addiction is not even on the same scale of addiction than the other examples. If F2P games are cocaine, then gambling is heroin. There is a reason why gambling is taking over Western economies so rapidly, but not any of those other things - it's just too good at exploiting people's brains. So when gambling addiction is so potent that it goes off the chart compared to any of the dozens of other things that can be psychologically addictive, people aren't particularly interested in finding the exact point where it's too much for society to bear - they just know that gambling is far beyond that point.
I'm not splitting hairs. It seems like we are just talking about outlawing things if we decide too large a % of the population engages with something in a problematic way.
This is certainly pragmatic, but not a framework based on morality or freedom. We're just being a nanny state forbidding the vast majority of people from doing something because a small minority of people don't have self control.
Maybe that sounds harsh, but it is accurate.
I'd prefer people were honest about it instead of trying to wrap it in the clothing of morality, when it has nothing to do with any kind of morality that makes sense.
It's really not a slippery slope, we just don't recognize addictions as such when we see them.
People engage with social media in an addictive manner every day. People sit around watching tv for 5+ hours a day. People do the same with videogames.
There are even people who cluster themselves away reading books in a way that is harmful to their lives and well being.
The only reason we recognize gambling is because the impact is so much more intense and visibly harmful.
All of these things are addictions though, so is qanon and conspiracy rabbit holes and those do have serious and rapid effects, and even that gets a pass.
You can see serious addictions in tons of people, even workaholics, and we just look the other way because it is less immediately harmful to society. Not because any of these addictions are more or less immoral.
I have heard that boating and aviation have similar financial financial outcomes to gambling. Keep in mind that the majority (way more than 50%) of people can engage with gambling safely, it is a minority that get into trouble
> I have heard that boating and aviation have similar financial financial outcomes to gambling.
But is that because you're betting at the repair shop to pull a mint condition replacement engine for your plane, or because people find a way in by paying a bearable upfront cost and then find themselves drowning in unexpected additional expenses associated with these hobbies far beyond the price of a boat or plane? To me it seems like the second one, so it's not a very useful comparison to gambling, it's just a lack of knowledge, foresight and financial literacy.
The gambling industry keeps refining their strategies all the time, new technologies have been a godsend to them. So I wouldn't rely on statistics all too much, because their goal is to use all psychological tricks that can be exploited in our brains to make us make the wrong decision and head down that path. Their effectiveness increases, and so are the depths to which they can get people to sink in their addictions. If you can engage with it safely right now, that is no predictor of how you'll react to the state of gambling in 3, 5 or 10 years. It's like as if the alcohol industry was allowed to invent brand new drugs and sell them without any oversight, targeting maximum potency and addiction and constantly refining their formulations.
f2p games and tv shopping network addictions absolutely leave a significant number of people destitute.
There are many other hobbies/forms of entertainment that can easily consume significant resources and leave some % of their userbase in serious financial trouble/ruin their lives.
Also I'm not sure it is correct to define morality by trying to connect how expensive a hobby/form of entertainment to whether it is immoral.
Not at all in comparison to gambling, and the F2P model is a scourge which gamers themselves pointed out was poisonous. Regulation has increasingly been catching up to it.
We have an entire science built around gambling, and we know how to titrate the payoffs and reward schedules to get people increasingly addicted.
Our movies/stories aren’t actively (yet) changing themselves to maximize their ability to keep you pressing coins into a slot, or when to string you along.
Many people enjoy gambling, and relatively few have a "problem", so "negative public good" is doing a lot of work there. DraftKings may indeed by unethical, but that doesn't mean that all or even most others are.
In my state (Massachusetts), the number of people who call in to the state’s gambling problem hotline doubled after online sports books became legalized. That is, by definition, a negative effect on the public good. The net number of people seeking help for gambling problems increased by 100%.
It’s definitely bad that twice as many people have a gambling problem. However to assess the NET impact you also have to count how much value/fun/whatever the non-problem-gamblers are having, plus whatever tax revenues you get, increased economic activity from more attention on sports, etc.
Personally I think these companies suck. Just need more work to make a strong good faith argument about it.
I think an important question to ask is: how much of a company's income comes from harmful use?
Gambling (and some other industries, in particular alcohol) come out so bad on this metric, you can practically let the industry define excessive use themselves. In order to claim most of their money comes from "healthy normal entertainment use" or similar, they'd have to claim absurd things, such as that drinking a bottle of whisky per day or spending your entire paycheck each month on slots can be healthy, normal use.
My problem with sports gambling is that all these companies are lying. If you win a lot you get (the gambling equivalent of) shadow banned[1]. The provider pretends they're providing a game where you can "win big" and it's all up to your knowledge of sports, but the reality is that it's a skewed playing field where you can either lose or lose more.
The common industry explanation is that this is because they would be unprofitable if they allowed "winners" to keep betting, which tells you everything you need to know. These businesses can only exist because they're allowed to skew the odds in their favour. Eliminate this unfair practice and the problem goes away on its own.
Yeah, I've worked in the industry for a long time. I think good regulation would prevent per punter limits. I don't really see why doing this would make the industry unprofitable, the odds have a margin baked in, exactly the same as a 0 (and in the US the 00) in roulette. Worst case they would have to increase the margin, which maybe isn't so good for casual players but at least it's a level playing field.
I also find the common implementation of in-play delay poor. The way it generally works is a delay is applied before confirming the bet, anything which changes (including pricing) causes the bet to be rejected. The main reason for this is that the traders sometimes only have access to something like sky sports so their feed is quite far behind someone at the stadium. I feel like in reality it should be based on official timings.
They will just switch to a betting exchange model where the house gets a percentage of the turnover and the rest is distributed to the players. Under this model there is no incentive to ban winners.
The big money maker in prediction markets is combos or parlays in traditional sports betting. The market for these types of bets is tiny so you need Wall Street firms like Susquehanna to come in and provide liquidity which is what they do for Kalshi.
What this means in practice is you don’t place a bet with fixed odds, it’s more like placing a market order on a stock.
If a Sportsbook could effectively give custom odds on each bet for each player based on the market it would essentially be what prediction markets do today.
The problem with this is liquidity, particularly well before an event. It's why the original exchange (or at least the first one I'm aware of) also now offer a normal sportsbook.
I have worked in gaming before so feel free to disregard my opinion but I truly do enjoy occasional betting and while its hard to argue it’s a net positive in my life it has never caused any financial hardship.
Betting $25 on a game hijacks something in my brain that treats it like a fun problem to solve. It gets me interested in teams that I’d otherwise have no interest in. I’ve been betting on sports since the days of offshore betting sites and I can’t say I’ve ever lost or gained more than a few hundred dollars a year.
I’m an adult and I enjoy being able to gamble on sports. It’s never been a problem for me and I suspect it never will be because of the way I do treat it, strictly something to be done for fun.
I grew up in a household where family members also went to casinos and bet on sports responsibly so it was drilled into my head that you can’t ever beat the house and you should never bet what you couldn’t afford to lose.
What business do you have telling me what I’m allowed to do with my own money for fun?
Making gambling illegal doesn’t make it just go away. My Grandfather used to bet on sports in 40s and 50s with a local bookie. The bookies even ran sweepstakes which resembled the modern day lotto which my great grandmother played every week.
People like to gamble we need it legalized with reasonable regulations.
What my big problem is that Wall St and the wider market seems to be trending to the least ethical companies (Kalshi, Polymarket, Bettr) are running unregulated gambling operations, providing 0 tax money to offset societal costs and are denying what they’re offering is gambling at all and even promising you can make money off it.
I mean, it depends. Gambling in moderation is fine, and it can be fun. Aside from concerns about supporting casinos/gambling companies (which I'll acknowledge are real), I don't see any difference between paying $200 to play blackjack for a couple of hours and paying $200 for some other form of entertainment (e.g. attending a live show).
I feel like a much larger fraction of the economy is predatory than is made out to be in these gambling discourses. Examples:
* FSA plans are designed to get you to gamble on how much medical expenses you will have; if you overestimate, you either lose the money or spend it on shit you otherwise wouldn't buy; if you underestimate, you pay taxes on stuff you shouldn't be paying taxes on. The healthy alternative would be: Cut the FSA, let people just tax deduct medical expenses at tax time, even small ones.
* Extended warranty plans are baiting you to pay for something you are statistically unlikely to need. The healthy alternative would be: Just service things past warranty and charge a much more reasoanable price for it.
* Insurances but co-insurances, deductibles, clauses: "We'll bait you into paying because you think we'll pay but we'll not actually pay because it says in the fine print"
* Trip protection: Asking you to gamble on the probability of a mishap, instead of just covering mishaps out of the box
In theory, insurance is the polar opposite of gambling. It's supposed to be reducing your risk, while gambling increases it. Like "do you want to gamble on that TV lasting, or do you want to buy the extended warranty?" But in practice, the pricing is so terrible that it's not worth it.
> The healthy alternative would be: Cut the FSA, let people just tax deduct medical expenses at tax time, even small ones.
That's an interesting rabbit hole. Some FSA types, but not all, have full funds available on day 1 of the year. And no provision for clawback if you terminate your employment before the end of the year. So when you forfeit due to overestimating the total, it does not go to the IRS, but your company. But the upside is the funds being available on day 1, with you having to wait until the next tax filing rolls around.
Unless you're planning on quitting jobs mid year every year I wouldn't really call that an advantage. On all other years you either end up buying piles of shit you don't need just to not lose your FSA dollars you gambled that you would use but didn't, or end up underestimating your medical bills. It's such a broken system that one even has to make guesses like this. There is no need to make people guess.
> funds being available on day 1
Most people with FSAs have higher disposable income so this isn't really an advantage either. Lower income folks typically have HSAs instead.
It was a low quality comment but what is the most addictive technology right now?
So addictive that even some of my (older) family members basically let it run their entire lives?
To be a millionaire, maybe, but a $300/month scrather habit over 20 years, in a 401k that's just the SP 500 gets you a quarter million dollars, which isn't nothing to retire on, vs approximately $0 from scratchers.
Dude no offense but you must be vastly overestimating how many people can save $300 a month. We're talking about people buying couple lottery tickets a month.
> We're talking about people buying couple lottery tickets a month
Those people do not have a gambling problem, though. They are dropping a few bucks a month to buy a daydream. It could be worse, they could be spending 10x that on Starbucks.
That's the problem though. I know many people who can't save $300/month, but easily spend that much in consumables, scratchers, alcohol, drugs, etc. On the subject of gambling addiction, $300/month by someone who can't afford it absolutely happens. Go to a GA meeting sometime. They get their paycheck, gamble it away, and then don't have money for rent. Unrestricted gambling is the devil and will be the downfall of America. I'm not one for "shoulds", but there should be something like an accredited gambler law, where you're not allowed to gamble more than 1/3rd your paycheck except in certain circumstances.
> there should be something like an accredited gambler law, where you're not allowed to gamble more than 1/3rd your paycheck except in certain circumstances.
What would that look like? Would gamblers have to send copies of their pay stubs or bank statements to every casino or gas station they visit and every gambling app they use? I'd be happy if we focused on restricting the most harmful actions of the companies who profit from the people they turned into addicts. No more online sports betting. No more adverting for gambling. No more targeting children with gambling in video games that accept real money for anything. No more using AI or surveillance to detect and target addicts.
Payday loan places usually look at paystubs before extending a loan, so all I'm suggesting is places where you can gamble have to implement the same technology. The restrictions you mention seem harder to pass under a banner of "but muh freedom".
At least those often fund things like state education so, over time, the pool of victims is maybe lessened by the success of the program? Maybe?
(I am not defending state lotteries, but I do think there's some distinction to be made between "we actively exploit people to maximize our profits for our own sakes" and "we regulate the passive exploitation of people to supplement taxes in a regressive manner." Or something. I dunno, maybe somebody has more elaborate thoughts on this to share.)
In many places where gambling is banned, there is still gambling. And in places where it's legalized, it can (in theory) be effectively regulated (if there's political will, which is difficult to muster sometimes). And say what you will about lotteries, but it's far easier to blow your life savings at casinos and with sports betting than buying a bunch of lottery tickets.
I'd be happy to stop billboards, other large public displays and those shitty coro-plast ones that jerks put next to the slip road telling me they pay cash for houses or have some magical mosquito treatment. Start there and work our way up?
See nature preserves that are funded by regulated big game hunting of the preserved nature.
It's a fun moral question. At what point do you give up trying to make someone/a population healthier and say "well if you're going to be this way, we might as well get some use out of you"?
"we regulate the passive exploitation of people to supplement taxes in a regressive manner."
I was convinced by this for a full 30 seconds before I realized there are millions of advertisements for the state lotteries. They aren't just regulating a market that will exist with or without the state, they are actively promoting and encouraging it
Can only speak for Pennsylvania, where I live, but before the lottery there were numbers games run by organized crime. At least with a state-run lottery they're a bit more honest about how you're getting screwed and they can tax the winnings.
I've got plenty of negative things to say about state government lotteries, but the ones I'm familiar with are structured in less predatory ways. It's hard to spend thousands of dollars on lottery tickets, and impossible to do so in a way that won't feel obviously stupid, especially since you can't buy them on your phone.
You can buy them on your phone in some states, e.g. Georgia. Their "scratch offs" look just like slot machines and give the same lovely dopamine spikes; used to drop $100 in every couple months when I just needed happy brain chemicals.
The problem is, some humans seem to be consistently drawn towards products or services that fit that description.
In the 1980s, if you wanted to gamble in my city, you went to a gambling den operated by the Civella crime family. If you got caught in a police raid, your life was ruined. If you got behind on your debts, the mob might take it out of you, literally. These were known risks, but people did it anyways.
Then, in the 1990s, there was a change in the casino gaming laws. Casinos opened with harm reduction measures in place. You can absolutely destroy your finances for life in one, but there are ways out.
These apps need regulation like in-person gambling has. Whatever they currently have, it's not enough.
It isn't inherently addictive. Gambling addiction is significantly less common than alcohol addiction, and has no properties that make it inherently addictive to someone who is not predisposed towards that addiction (unlike drugs, for example, which are inherently addictive to all humans).
Some slot machines/casino games are designed to appeal to problem gamblers. DK and co, however, do not design these games, and state regulators do already control aspects of their design. For online operators, this doesn't represent most of their revenue and, I suspect, most would be quite happy not to provide these products.
I've seen this "it only affects problem gamblers" thing so much that I suspect it's an intentional strategy to shift blame that takes advantage of people's natural tendency to believe the just world fallacy (bad things only happen to bad people).
Nobody's life is ruined by gambling unless they've made a bunch of irresponsible decisions. Bad things certainly happen to good people, but problem-gambling is self inflicted.
Gambling is absolutely inherently addictive as it's essentially perfectly paired with your brains reward system and hijacks it. There's literally dopamine cycle and tolerance happening. And when compounded by algorithms and notifications which are designed to amplify this even further I'm not sure how you can think it's not inherently addictive.
> unlike drugs, for example, which are inherently addictive to all humans
Define "drugs". Alcohol is a drug. Most users aren't addicts. So is tobacco. Most users are addicts. Cannabis? More like alcohol than tobacco in terms of addictiveness.
There may be some selection bias. Smoking tobacco is an unpleasant sensation. There's no reason to do it other than the addiction and the effects on your brain chemistry afterwards. Whereas many alcoholic drinks taste great in their own right and would be consumed even if they had no chemical effects.
I suspect gambling is like alcohol or cannabis. Engaging in it affects brain chemistry. For some people that's addictive. Most people are able to enjoy the activity without being hooked.
> But the little head rush you get starting the day with a coffee and a cigarette feels great.
That's the effect on brain chemistry I referred to.
Do you actually enjoy the smoke in your mouth, burning your eyes and lungs?
A cold beer on a hot day is refreshing just for its temperature alone. A fruity cocktail tastes good because sugar tastes good. What's enjoyable about the physical sensations produced by smoke?
I mean maybe we're arguing semantics, because the pleasure of eating sugar is possibly also an alteration of brain chemistry. But there is a difference.
As a former smoker (quit in 2009), I absolutely LOVED smoking. The whole thing. Opening the pack, packing it down, pulling out the cigarette, lighting it, the first drag filling my lungs, the fullness in my chest. The only thing I didn't like was that it made me smell bad. When I started a job where I was working close to people and the smell made me insecure, I decided to quit. I still miss the ritual.
Anyone who has quit smoking will tell you that the habit is the hardest part about quitting, not the physical addiction.
Most people don't actually like the taste of alcoholic drinks when they first try them as a teenager.
The reason you like the taste of beer is in large part because your brain has learned to associate that taste with good things happening (the alcohol feeling).
Same with coffee, it's bitter, objectively should taste bad, but you learn to like it.
> The reason you like the taste of beer is in large part because your brain has learned to associate that taste with good things happening (the alcohol feeling).
Explain the popularity of non-alcoholic beer.
> Same with coffee, it's bitter, objectively should taste bad
Many fruits, vegetables, and foods (cheeses, unsweetened chocolate) are naturally bitter and widely enjoyed, even though they don't give you a high.
People also enjoy bitter caffeine-free herbal teas.
> Most people don't actually like the taste of alcoholic drinks when they first try them as a teenager.
Many children don't like vegetables either. Adults more often do. Our tastes change as we grow older.
> Do you actually enjoy the smoke in your mouth, burning your eyes and lungs?
TBH I just didn't have those sensations. People wouldn't get hooked if it felt terrible.
My sister still smokes, and every now and then I'll have a few hits of one of hers, and it's great. No doubt I could get hooked again if I wasn't careful.
The silver lining is there's a whole boatload of drugs I never tried (and never will) because I know first hand how easy it is to get addicted.
The real number we want evaluate is "what percent of the revenue comes from people experiencing significant negative consequences from the product."
For alcohol that number is something like 2/3 revenue from the top 10% of drinkers, who drink an order of magnitude more than the decile below them. I doubt gambling is very different but if you have more info I'm happy to hear it.
Gambling is proven to be addictive in the same way many other things are, and the harm of severe addiction is comparable to that of the worst drugs. It's very common for severe gambling addicts to lose everything they have, to lose everything they love, to never psychologically recover, to kill themselves.
IMHO one shouldn't expect a company to have any ethics to achieve a positive outcome for society. This needs to be baked into the rules (taxes, regulation, ...), so the ethical behavior becomes the rational behavior.
I think we should be able to expect a company to have ethics, just like we should be able to expect them to follow the laws, but we should also regulate them to ensure that they do and punish them meaningfully when they fail to.
You can't have rules in a society, that are against the moral feeling of sizable chunk of the population. That's just going to be a source for conflict. At some point you do need a population with a moral compass or you get nowhere as a ruler, especially in participatory ruling systems like a democracy.
I think it's not a matter of want.
The goverment makes the rules, and the rules decide the emergent behavior of people, in companies and elsewhere. Whether their emergent behavior is good or bad, whatever that means, is a result of the way that your particular country selects the goverment. Mine is probably different than your's.
companies are a fiction made out of people, they don't have anything, and regardless what the rules are I expect those people to behave ethically at any given time.
I'm not entirely sure when people started to have this idea that when they walk through a company door, as if this is some magical portal into the realm of amorality, give up their human responsibilities and faculties
> I expect those people to behave ethically at any given time.
A company is set up and incentivised to maximize a profit function, and that in turn incentivises to promote people which are not impeded by ethical considerations. The hierarchy furthermore ensures that people which would otherwise act ethical, don't, for fear of losing their job. This structure behaves ethical as long as you put ethics in the profit function.
Again, who is setting it up, who is "the hierarchy", who "puts ethics into a profit function". This is weasel language to not talk about the ethical responsibility of individual human beings.
These firms don't spawn into existence, they don't choose their own functions and if the people in charge don't think ethically why should anyone else? Ethics is not a game of musical chairs. The people in charge of that company can choose, right now, to orient it towards a direction that's ethical, if that's not possible they can choose to close it down or leave. That's up to any person at any point.
There's nobody to do ethics for you, there is no ethics fairy to magically imbue your company with ethics, and if you hope the politicians or "the law" does it but you can't, why do you think the politicians are going to be any better, they all have the same financial incentives. It is you or nobody else.
"I'm not entirely sure when people started to have this idea that when they walk through a company door, as if this is some magical portal into the realm of amorality, give up their human responsibilities and faculties"
how can you became this naive ???? this is literally a company that get profit when you a lose
they are making a moral decision but a selfish one. If I take this job I can eat and support my family, if I don't I need to hope that I find another one.
Very few actually want to work for corporations that are unethical and prey on people and their weaknesses, but a large portion of the population does.
It started with Milton Friedman and the idea that The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits -- full stop, nothing else.
That frees one to think in a different way. No longer constrained by the convention of the common good, some folks, for instance, watched the movie "Wall Street", and took it not as the warning it so clearly was, but rather as in instruction manual. The wider populace believes this nonsense because it was passed on to us via Television, the Great Glowing Box of Truth that for the big chunk of the 20th century was the arbiter of reality.
Now we have people so confused by this bullshit and so in need of viewing themselves as "temporary poor" that they vote against their own interests on a regular basis.
Fortunately, the changing climate will wipe us out. :)
Would love to be a fly on the wall in whatever board room in the world has somebody saying “yes, we could increase profits by doing X, but that would be unethical so of course we won’t”
This happens at every gambling company in regulated markets like the US or Europe.
For comparison, there are offline casinos who use targeted adverts saying that they do not comply with regulators, and their adverts are designed in such a way as to appeal to people with gambling addiction (usually showing some kind of live play, which is banned in every regulated market afaik).
You can be sceptical of the motives of individuals but there are very strong corporate incentives from state regulators (in the US, particularly those with physical casinos).
> This happens at every gambling company in regulated markets like the US or Europe.
No something clearly different happens in regulated markets. There's a massive difference between "This would make us more money, but we won't do that because it's unethical" and "I wish we could get away with doing this unethical thing to make more money, but sadly current regulations make this one unprofitable for now. Lets increase our lobbying spend to try to fix that."
What usually happens is they talk about statistics rather than demographics. Eg “when doing x we’ve seen a 5% rise in engagement but a 50% rise in spend from those engaged”
Nobody is actually blind to the reality of the stats but this kind approach makes it both easier to dehumanise their actions as well as giving them plausible deniability when asked if they target specific demographics such as addicts.
I don’t think anyone ethical really goes into gambling business. I know engineers who left their high paying job in these “gaming” businesses to work for software companies because they see how many lives are destroyed and they are part of that system
The best thing would be to ban these sites. But barring that, they should be required to have auditing involving secret accounts that display this behavior and see how the app responds. It is crazy that they are allowed to send notifications to users that have set limits and use other techniques to encourage them to transfer more money.
I think we could legislate some easy-to-understand, easy-to-enforce rules. Like, "you can't have more than N bets open at a time." (1?) Or, "you can't have more than $1,000 worth of bets open at a time."
True, addicts could skirt these rules by having different bets on different sites. But at least it would add a little friction, and it would be easy to monitor compliance.
Meaning that, should they get the memo, they’d change their behaviour to that of a legitimate business? Not being combative here, just not sure I follow what you’re saying.
Makes me sick that all of the major-league sports are in bed with companies like Draft Kings, completely ignoring the fact that the next Pete Rose-style scandal — or worse — is absolutely going to happen any time now.
The libertarian in me says people should be allowed to make their own choices but I can't negate that gambling in poor is overall significantly negative for society. Before India banned this kind of gambling, I had a firend who worked as a data scientist for Dream11, an online fatasy cricket like gambling app. He was able to see a lot about the people playing. Oftentimes, the daily 'ticket size' was somewhere around 100-300INR (about $1-3), these were folks earning maybe 1.5 to twice that at the most. Their kids were often going hungry so their parents could play.
>The libertarian in me says people should be allowed to make their own choices
This is a real question/comment, not a snarky one. When a libertarian says "people should be allowed", it seems to me to only mean "individuals". Because when "people", through their government, "make their own choices" collectively, this seems to be where libertarians get worked up.
Hopefully something comes of it. When ProPublica blew open the rent-fixing scam, officials laser-focused on one company that was doing what the entire industry was doing, dragged out prosecution, and then settled for peanuts, with the people whose lives were thrown into upheaval by criminal rent increases *ahem* not seeing a dime. What should have been a major scandal, what should have rocked the housing market, was instead brushed under the rug. And, of course it was, because it would have rocked the housing market.
Are people with ethics going to seek out jobs in the gambling industry, especially mobile addictionware gambling?
I'd work in weapons before I'd work in this. At least those are usually used against military targets and overall hurt or kill fewer people. A rocket might blow up one school, but this will destroy millions of families.
I mean what do we expect ???? "the house" is playing fair ????
we literally have mobile game that have "gacha" which is full blown gamble and we pretend that the actual "online casino" is to play moral, ethics or fairness ??
Not just mobile games. Roblox is basically an online child casino, powered by child laborers being compensated in Robux scrip. Fortnite isn't much better. We'd do a lot of good by regulating these games better too. The gambling addicts who got hooked with these games will move on to DraftKings when they're older. DraftKings knows this is their pipeline and has been investing in esports and video games like Call of Duty and establishing partnerships with Riot Games and Activision Blizzard.
What is your point? Bad thing happened in the past, we should continue to let bad thing happen?
Most people find current system of gambling from phone to be too much. Forcing people to physical location and limiting advertising can be good harm reduction without causing increase in crime.
Yes, loot boxes and other types of casino games throughout the economy are a problem. Online Sports Betting has taken a small problem and caused it to be a big one so it's much more visible in public eye.
If we regulate sports betting, we should probably regulate loot boxes in FIFA 27 as well.
I think the blame falls much more squarely on powerful individuals like Adam Silver[1] and the companies that lobbied for this[2] than on society as a whole.
Everything starts out permitted. Making things illegal requires action, and enforcing laws requires the application of nonconsensual violence - a direct action.
This goes back to the trolley problem. I'm part of society, and I'm not to blame in any way for this; I had nothing to do with it.
"presenting signs"...there is no way for DK to tell that someone is addicted, which is the same error of logic in the original article.
There are multiple companies that will take your money and data and say they have found a way of identifying gamblers, afaik none of these products actually or can work.
What that article showed is: someone uses a product, they do not activate any features to use the product safely, and then they it is unsafe. DK have safety features integrated with governments already in the product.
Yes, it happens to every gambler who spends a lot of money. That is how VIP tiers are defined, based on how much you spend. There is no way for them (or anyone) to understand the customer's state of mind. Should it be illegal for retailers to offer customers discounts? Compulsive shopping is significantly more common than gambling addiction, do retailers target those customers?
If you never want to gamble, you tell the state regulator you never want to gamble and you will be unable to use any site.
>There is no way for them (or anyone) to understand the customer's state of mind.
Maybe not their state of mind but if you have access to people's betting history you can very likely identify people who are "problem gamblers", especially if you also ask them their annual income when they become a customer (I have no idea whether they do this in the US, but they do on UK sites and will suspend your account if your betting exceeds certain thresholds).
You certainly wouldn't even AI to spot people who are chasing their losses for example.
As to whether they should be obliged to care, I'm not sure. But through public policy you can make it their problem.
You get made a VIP if you lose a lot of money, not if you have a gambling problem. In fact being made a VIP is basically the only way that the company can identify problem gamblers besides self-reports (because its the only time people from the company actually talk directly to the user).
My data science graduate program had a class that analyzed major data science success stories. The very first one covered how Caesar's Entertainment built models and ran experiments to identify their "most valuable customers", figure out how to predict when they were getting ready to leave the casino, and intervene with incentives and perks designed to get them to stay and keep gambling. And also how all of their competitors rushed to implement their own programs in response.
Look at it from the casino's perspective: their entire business model is centered on exploiting quirks of human psychology to separate people from their money. Expecting prosocial behavior from them is like expecting a squirrel to ignore your bird feeders.
The EFF isn't saying it's a surprise that companies are doing this. Nobody's surprised by that. They're drawing attention to it and saying they shouldn't be allowed to.
I just don’t understand why casino’s feel the need to do that. They already have the edge, they would still turn a profit.
Same goes for banning advantage players. Why? The people that can successfully do it are a vanishingly small group, and even if every single one of them picks your casino because it doesn’t ban advantage players, the sheer amount of incompetent advantage players that would try alongside those would make it so you still turn a profit.
It's only the most cutthroat people who end up being in the position to make the decisions. So they end up making the decisions that come naturally to them
At least with a car you know exactly what you're getting, you might not value it but many people out there are absolutely getting their money's worth back from a 100k car, be it ego or aesthetics or whatever, a gambling addict is just getting exploited and abused, there's no positive to it.
I like how you have to be an accredited investor to get involved with riskier investment instruments but you can be a total moron with no money and lose whatever you have left betting on sports and prediction markets.
Btw it’s not just those two, add iGaming into the mix which is cell phone gambling glammed up in Candy Crush form. Leeches, all of them.
I believe there are "casino games" on Apple and Android stores that are similar to actual gambling, you just buy "tokens" that can never be redeemed for cash.
Proof if proof needed of the complete pointlessness of casino gambling. Some people will still do it even when they know they can't win anything.
"In the United States, to be considered an accredited investor, a natural person must have a net worth of at least $1,000,000, excluding the value of one's primary residence, or have income at least $200,000 each year for the last two years (or $300,000 combined income if married) and have the expectation to make the same amount this year, or must otherwise be a holder of a specific license in good standing."
Of course you can still lie but legally there is a line.
The standard may be higher, but the implementation is "This is what it means to be accredited: are you accredited? By the way if you say no, I can't sell you the thing I've been trying to convince you to buy."
If you had to take and pass a test, that might filter out more people; although I'm sure the seller would help you pass the test, so maybe not.
its purpose is simple. if you lose the money of sufficiently powerful people, as a middleman, the standard exposes you one more kind of legal jeopardy.
Somebody said (I think it was FrostPrime) roughly: Gambling is genuinely the scariest drug, I actually think it's worse than cocaine and it's just right there on your phone.
I think that really framed the issue well to me. Imagine having an addiction problem and having to carry the problem substance around with you 24/7.
Every personality has something, it seems, that it tends to get addicted to if given the chance. Gambling has never been that to me. I get bored with most of the games and upset at losing money—even if I net win, I’m irritated about the incremental losses.
On the other hand, I have to manually keep track of how many days in a month I drink because if I don’t I’ll happily have half a bottle of wine every evening, and I think I know where that leads. (When I lose money in a casino I almost always translate that into a nice dinner. Which I will, invariably, enjoy far more than winning imaginary numbers.)
> and upset at losing money—even if I net win, I’m irritated about the incremental losses.
While you don't appear to be susceptible, it is notable that this mindset is not something that makes you less likely to develop a gambling problem. It's actually part of how they drive addiction. A customer who is annoyed at every loss is often a customer who will chase their losses with more/bigger bets, trying to get the winning high back.
> customer who is annoyed at every loss is often a customer who will chase their losses with more/bigger bets
That makes sense. When I lose a bit the boredom accelerates and I just want to leave. I’ve “spent” the money on an experience and it was boring.
The only exception to this is card games. But I don’t like those at casinos or on my phone. And I’d be happier playing a board game with most of the folks I play poker with.
The fact that you think you incrementally lose but are a net winner indicates to me you're illinformed.
As someone with years of experience in this industry, only a fraction of a percent of gamblers actually meet this defination. But they all think they're net winners and write off losses as "incremental"
The other one on that list is food (or, using food to cope with trauma, resulting in an addiction).
You have to eat to survive, but when it becomes your only source of peace or happiness and/or you get addicted to it … very bad things happen and it’s very hard to moderate.
I don't think there is nearly enough attention on the pipeline that has been created for children to grow into good little gamblers. All major sports games have absolute borderline gambling within their game in the form of those fantasy style Card games. Pair that with watching any live broadcast of a major sport and the gross ads for all these major sports better companies, with the ad reads during the game.
Haven't followed all that closely for some other games, but it very much seems like the model for NBA2k is to release a new game with some minor patches each year, charge 70$, then spend the majority of that year crafting patches for the card game to keep whales interested in constantly spending on new packs(which are promptly devalued on the next release, and straight up killing the prior year's game's online service, makes them entirely worthless the next year).
It’s really disturbing to me because sports are one category of entertainment that is supposed to be family friendly and accessible to kids. They look up to pro athletes as heroes and all the gambling ads are directly being shown to children. It shouldn’t be legal to advertise age restricted products and services to kids, even if they’re not the “intended” target. They’re still being groomed to accept gambling as cool and normal. Gambling, alcohol, all those ads should be subject to the same safe harbor restrictions as sexual content. Ban the ads from stadiums and jerseys too.
I don't watch sports much, but the last times I did they filled the screen with ads for gambling in the middle of the games while they were being played
beyond that, every sports podcast actively encourages gambling. hosts lightheartedly joke about their bad beats like its a pratfall. while entertaining as a non-gambling outsider, i think its a colloquial rationalization of life-ruining behavior
When a gambling addict spends money on a bet, they're actually spending that money on a moment of hope. After the bet is placed but before the cards fall, they can live in a place where there is at least a possibility that they can make enough money to escape their problems. That moment of possibility is experienced as hope, and it's a feeling that's truly addictive to the hopeless.
It's scary like all addiction, but particularly sad at its core.
i've always wondered at the intimate relation between risk, dopamine, anticipation, and utility. I'm not an expert and only going by amateur armchair observation, but i suspect that evolution has spent a lot of attention on the problem of non-guaranteed rewards, and the phenomenon of gambling addiction is merely a reflection of that, just like how that of adhd is a reflection of ancient humans needing to be overly alert for subtle signs of danger (or something like that, not an expert)
That "live in a place with possibility" surely triggers the anticipation part of dopamine (which is what it really is, more so than the pleasure part). Dopamine is also intimately connected to movement: i.e. the shakes for people with neurological conditions as well as addicts going through withdrawal or about to relapse.
“Gambling company leans into its target demographic”
I worked with a state lottery that did similar things. Their target demographic was the “every day players” that would compulsively buy at the gas station.
I quit that job because it seems to be morally wrong.
Betting apps are just this taken to the extreme, I feel for people with this addiction but it’s not going away anytime soon.
I worked with a state lottery as well. They had very clear training for the retailers they worked with to identify and stop problem gambling. There was space reserved in ever ad and on every retailer counter for stop gambling assistance. The few meetings I attended all began with what they had done to reduce problem gambling.
It's hard for me to view that as anything other than mostly for show.
The retailers still have every incentive to sell as many lottery tickets as people will buy, because that's how they make a sizable portion of their money.
And the gambling addiction hotlines are too little too late. I've known people who struggled with gambling. They never admitted they had a problem until they had bottomed out. At that point I doubt the lotteries and casinos particularly care because that well's already run dry, anyway.
If the gaming industry really wanted to put their money where their mouth is on this one, they'd figure out ways to prevent people from getting into that situation in the first place. Putting limits on how much money anyone person can lose, even if only at a single establishment, is one idea that wouldn't even be hard to implement. But of course we won't see that because, unlike gambling addiction hotlines, that runs the risk of reducing their profits.
I worked with a heroin distributor as well. They had very clear training for the dealers they worked with to identify and stop problem heroin use. There was space reserved in every text and on every dealer’s coffee table for stop heroin assistance.
Not equating your work for a lottery with dealing heroin, I’m just pointing out that to say you don’t want people addicted to heroin while still selling heroin isn’t sufficient, and I think the same applies to lotteries. If they acknowledge the problem stop even offering it as a product.
The difference is that the regulator controls your licence to operate. So if you do something that fails to meet the guidelines they create for responsible gaming then they take away your licence.
Acknowledging the problem doesn't make it go away: you must be a big war on drugs guy? right?
Fair point, and I’ll concede that regulation is an attractive concept here. But in the gambling case specifically it seems that regulation has resulted in an explosion in gambling. The hotlines and responsible gaming stuff appears totally ineffectual and geared more towards the operators being able to say “we care and are doing something” when what they’re actually doing is using AI to prey on people. At least with drug decriminalization or legalization there are genuine attempts at harm reduction.
> Betting apps are just this taken to the extreme, I feel for people with this addiction but it’s not going away anytime soon.
Why? This wasn't a thing that existed 10-15 years ago, this isn't some long-standing institution. We could ban online betting apps today if we wanted to.
When widespread sports gambling was illegal before, there were not rich and powerful people whose ability to maintain and grow their wealth and power was tied to keeping sports gambling legal.
Now those rich and powerful people exist, and they will use their wealth and power to keep it legal. It is not easy to put the genie back into the bottle.
> I worked with a state lottery that did similar things. Their target demographic was the “every day players”
That's wild. Wasn't the whole point of having a state lottery to put the state in a better position to be able to discourage people from becoming addicted? The very idea of a "target demographic" seems contrary to that goal; the "target" should be to have nobody buying tickets.
One of the arguments was to make gambling legal, less harmful, and regulated to protect players from cheating. In my state the state lottery company puts out TV ads. Stores have scratch off vending machines with strobe lights on top. So much for harm reduction and making gambling something that you have to actively seek out.
Ban state lotteries while we're banning DraftKings IMO. I find I cannot have a productive conversation with anyone who thinks the odds of winning the lottery are higher than winning in the stock market buying total market funds.
Ah... Got it... The same galaxy brains that think p(foom) has a materially greater value than an epsilon minimally >0 to avoid divide by zero errors believe in lottery tickets. Got it. Explains a lot, thanks...
Your $1 lottery coupon has extremely low chances of winning a million dollars, but they aren't zero. No one will sell you any stocks for $1, but even if they did what is a chance of a random $1 stock increasing in value one million times?
You have been able to buy mutual funds in dollar increments for like forever, with the significant caveat that there's often a minimum purchase amount, but once you hold that you can add in single dollars if you want +/- they only deal in a certain number of decimals.
Fractional share trading of stocks and ETFs happens at a lot of brokers for the past several years, too. Do they really want you to buy $1 of BRK.A? probably not, but you probably can.
Also, there's like penny stocks. :P
But yeah, there's no mechanism for that $1 to turn into millions of dollars within a few days. It can happen with a very well timed purchase, many decades, and some inflation, but that's not very exciting.
Expected return on a total market fund is 9 to 10% annually.
Expected return on a lottery ticket is 30 to 50 cents on the dollar.
Just like AI p(Doom) in the next decade is approximately zero, but we all have to pretend to it's between 1 and 10% so American frontier labs can implement regulatory capture.
So if what you're saying is you are willing to bet $1 if I give you a 1 in 1 billion chance of winning $1M, I will take that bet. And I will take that bet as many times as you'd like.
But your best chance of winning $1M? Start with $10M.
I dont think the post you are replying to was saying gambling on lotteries is rational. They are just saying the best possible outcome of buying a lottery ticket is much, much higher than buying an index fund (and the average, median, and worst outcomes are much worse)
Man, who would be so stupid to get addicted to gambling?
Oooh, Claude is giving me a free spi... reset until October 22? Maybe I will stay on their Max plan. My tokens aren't getting me as far as previously, maybe I should buy another plan? Man, I just got this one new startup idea, I know this will be the one where investors will love me. I can feel it. C'mon Opus, just one more session... come ooon...
Chronic losers, says the article. Not whales. That's unexpected. I'd thought that those big gambling sites were parimutuel, where the counterparty is other bettors and the site just takes a cut. Horse racing tracks and prediction markets work that way.
The house can't lose, and doesn't care who wins. The odds keep changing as bets come in and the odds rebalance.
Apparently that's not true for sports betting.
A 2024 study out of Connecticut found that 1.8% of problem gamblers in the state accounted for 51% of sports betting revenue.[1]
I frequently get DraftKings ad on YouTube featuring Kevin Hart and Nick Jonas, they're pushing the information that it is now legal in every state.
I also get loads Polymarket and Kalshi ads. Polymarket seems to have invested tons into featuring mega celebs like LeBron in one of their ads. Other ads feature influencers showing off how to trade and such. More obnoxious part is that these companies pay influencers to talk about trading and winning live on streams- without disclosing they're paying those influencers.
Polymarket even set up fake website where influencers showed they were winning hundreds of thousands of dollars. You wouldn't find those bets on the real Polymarket website.
It's an era where destroying genuine intrinsically valuable things is the highest reward activity. Until we run out of things to convert to money, that is.
Except online poker (here in the states)! Gotta keep that one prohibited. Now, betting on every freethrow Joe BBall takes in a game ... we're morally good there. It's those pesky immoral cards we have a problem with!
Individual liberty is a dangerous thing, by design.
Existence isn't safe, and it's not up to the state to try to make it safe for you. It's our responsibility as a society to ensure that you have maximum liberty, insofar as it does not directly harm other people.
You are entirely free (or, should be) to harm yourself, or to make decisions that put yourself in danger.
Some betting company made a partnership with my area's public bus system to put their ads on the side of the bus. There is no recourse for this, it seems, and this explosion of gambling ads is only going to get worse.
Couldn't we make an argument that Meta is using AI to behaviorally target chronic lazy thinkers?
On a serious note: no idea why we legalized nation wide (maybe it's just certain states) gambling on Sports. Money talks. We know this.
I lived in Boston during the early hey day of DraftKings in 2015 when it was just a game, and they spent something like 250M of series C money on marketing [1]. The entire city was pretty much "littered" with ads. Everywhere you looked. I interviewed there as it was one of the hottest startups in the city. But for some reason, I knew it was a front-door into sports betting and I was pretty off-put by the whole thing. Didn't know it would go as far as it did, though. (Also, I didn't want to write C#.)
A toast to all of you who've left career money on the table because you have some minimal form of ethics and morality.
> DraftKings is using AI to behaviorally target chronic gamblers
Wow, this actually sounds like an amazing idea!
> According to the New York Times, DraftKings is using its customers’ betting records to train a machine learning model to find losing gamblers. Once found, DraftKings sends these customers targeted advertising designed to lure them back to the site to place more bets—bets that DraftKings thinks will be losing ones. DraftKings has a business incentive to keep losing gamblers coming back to their site, because these are the users actually making DraftKings money.
I worked in gaming for a long time. I'm sorry to break it to you, but this is the entire gaming industry(not just gambling). And it has been that at least since the early 2010s when I got involved and all the way until I got away from it.
One thing not mentioned here, is how this also affects those not gambling. People act as if the only problem is how it exploits gambling addicts.
But it fundamentally changes sports. Both the amount of money in them, which comes with their own problems (see ManCity's judgement today). But also how players are affected. I know a soccer player in lower divisions getting death threats because someone in another country was gambling on their match. People try to bribe what's basically amateurs etc.
I suspect most of the fraud by volume is going to be committed in the lower leagues in most nations just do to more access to individuals and less scrutiny.
The problem is any fraud at all, and the fact that it’s so incredibly easy to do it now, degrades trust and the sense of fair play. It’s now much more believable to question refs making bad calls against one team or another because of a profit incentive.
I'm not sure legalized betting makes fraud itself that much easier, but I'd agree that the incentives could now be larger in the US if tied in with legal betting. Those markets dwarf the illegal markets that drove a lot of famous instances of fraud prior to legalization. More fans are probably suspicious of calls now but, I mean, sports fans don't generally need much of a push to find a reason for suspicion of officials.
Not to mention the allegations of match fixing. As a massive college football (American) fan, every outcome that someone doesn't like is questioned on every forum as "the refs had a bet on it" or whatever.
Gambling addiction is a brutal public health problem. As I understand it, gambling addicts have a very high incidence of suicidal ideation. When people work in these industries, their paychecks are directly coming from putting people into deep suffering.
That's a matter of opinion. There are those of us that believe that it is a gross violation of one's human rights to dictate how they're allowed to spend the money that they earned.
It's a side effect of liberty that people can choose to put themselves into deep suffering. I know people who do the same by blowing all of their money on designer clothes or expensive cars. Nobody is talking about regulating poor people wasting money on those things.
If you earn the money, you're entitled to piss it away. Them's the breaks.
I don't think any part of the comment you're responding to is "a matter of opinion." You're choosing to insert your opinion that you don't think it's moral for a government to help addicts if they are charged for the thing they're addicted to.
You're welcome to that opinion, but don't pretend that "addiction is a public health issue, gambling addicts have high suicide rates, and many profit from others' addictions" are subjective.
Do you also support legalization of hard drugs? Why not have a heroin store in every town. The customers are very loyal. Let people waste their money on drugs, it's not my place to tell people what to spend their money on. Who knows, maybe we'll get heroin ads on the subway. In fact, let's let cigarette companies also advertise again! what could possibly go wrong?
at the same time, it's really not cool for billions of dollars to be spent on research of how to best influence susceptible people (who would otherwise not piss it all away,) to piss all their money away.
ban the predatory advertising and maximally addictive interfaces and most people will be happy. you can still piss your money away if you want to. but it really shouldn't be one poor sap with an addiction vs. a trillion dollar industry trying to exploit that addiction.
Problem is when it effects others. Addicts often have families. There's also a social cost when they go broke and lose everything. Just like with drug addicts.
But this is more about the companies preying on addiction, incentivizing it.
> That's a matter of opinion. There are those of us that believe that it is a gross violation of one's human rights to dictate how they're allowed to spend the money that they earned.
Hi, we live in a society. People who bankrupt themselves out of whatever money they have earned and become a burden to the society at large via homelessness/welfare/crime. Which is also the same case for hard drugs (traditionally this was originally a problem with opiates). I personally do not care if you decide you want to kill yourself with heroin, but I do care as soon as our taxes are used to deal with you as a side-effect.
So making reasonable laws that curtail some of the worst things you can piss your money away on to curb crime/homelessness/welfare/er-bill-delenquency expenditures seems like a wise decision.
Libertarian thinking tries to ignore these side effects but they are real.
>I personally do not care if you decide you want to kill yourself with heroin, but I do care as soon as our taxes are used to deal with you as a side-effect.
isn't this already the case with a lot of things that carry less negative stigma? bankrupcty, limited liability, extreme sports (base jumping, rock climbing, etc), financial risk taking, health choices, bailouts are more socially accepted, but they also risk pushing costs onto the public upon failure.
i mean if you base jump and your chute fails you end up as a smear at the bottom of a cliff somewhere. They will probably attempt an air rescue and some poor park ranger will have to come out with some buckets of water and wash whats left of you off their monument. However as someone who knows someone who had to be airlifted out of a national park, he survived and paid for that helicopter ride and his medical bills (gust of wind blew him off an exposed high trail and down into a very steep ravine where he broke a leg).
A heroin/fent/meth addict doesn't die right away, and usually doesn't die until after years of crime/homelessness/welfare. They cost every day until they finally overdose, now with narcan (if they are on an opiate) they can be saved from that overdose (and hopefully rehabilitated) but often that doesn't even stop them.
We have to draw lines somewhere and sports betting, in my opinion is somewhere a line should be re-drawn.
Advertising needs to be more targeted if anything. I don't want to see a bunch of irrelevant junk - I want to see high quality products that are useful to my life.
Is your idea that manipulative advertising actually works based on anything? Trying to make people want something they don't already want is a massive waste of money.
Yes, based on it being one of the largest most profitable industries in the world. There is an immense amount of data showing that shoveling ad money into a product will convince some percent of people to buy it. Or just glance at the ads that fill up most people's Facebook feed and Google SERPs; it's mostly crap that looks flashy but few seconds but that few if any people actually have a real need for.
I've personally blocked who knows how many tens of thousands of ads online over the past couple decades. Somehow I doubt my life is lacking for not buying hundreds of extra products I would have learned about from all those targeted ads.
Let's work off of dictionary.com's definition of manipulation:
>to manage or influence skillfully, especially in an unfair manner.
I think we can agree that advertisers influence skillfully, given that advertising firms don't typically pick their executives from a pool of unskilled labor. If I were taking your position, I would take issue with the qualifier "unfair" here. After all, what's unfair about showing a product that people are interested in? Isn't that what they want? To be shown things that are interesting? People don't often go to uninteresting movies, or sit through uninteresting lectures. Surely it saves everyone a lot of time to skip through the uninteresting products and get right to the ones that actually make sense for a person to buy.
This is where it gets interesting. Targeted ads a not simply "showing a person something they are interested in, because in order to show something to someone who is interested in it, we have to have a willful expression of that interest. When a person goes to a car dealership, they don't say "hey! It's unfair that you're showing me all these cars!" because, well, they expressed interest in cars by showing up at a car dealership and asking for a person to show them around.
Targeted ads do not take in willful signals. They take in surveillance data. They watch how a person moves and infer things about them; they assess when the right moment of low will power exists, to insert the ad at just the right moment of influence-ability. That is what is unfair about them, because it subverts the social contract around the purchase of goods and services. Instead of making one's product so good that the most number of people will buy it, they follow people around to find the time they are most vulnerable to what they're selling.
In that case you don't want advertising, you want better product discovery. Advertising is fundamentally incompatible with usefulness because it's based on how much cash someone can fork over. A company can make the best product in a market segment, but if they don't have the money to advertise it, they will lose to the hot garbage offered by their competitors. The only recourse is people organically recommending the product to one another - so the most useful venue is not even advertising. Letting companies pay for your attention is actively hostile to you, because there is no guarantee they're presenting you with the best option, just THEIR option.
I'll repeat an idea I had a while ago, but if countries just had national networks where companies could list their products and services in a way that is highly structured and as systematically scrubbed of bias or psychological manipulation as possible, we would get the best of both worlds. Effortless and non-favoring lookup of what you want, fair comparisons between products, no favoritism to the wealthy, no FOMO or mind tricks.
> because it's based on how much cash someone can fork over
I'd argue here that a business's marketing budget is going to be effectively unlimited if it's profitable, assuming they have the initial budget to kickstart it which most do. If $10 in ad spend returns $12, you can just keep pouring money into it.
Apart from that yeah you're right that the goal is better product discovery.
The previous reality for sports betting was mostly illicit, often with some goon using physical violence or threat thereof for collections. This is not to say the new reality is an improvement.
In general, there is a bigger philosophical question.
Do we treat humans as
1) having full agency, and thus full responsibility for their actions
2) having less than full agency, and then to what extent must society/governments implement control over things that humans can't control within themselves
Because generally, if you subscribe to 1, there is nothing immortal from taking money from a human that that wants to hand it over, provided that human well knows what is at stake. So as long as these websites aren't defrauding the customers with fake stats, there really is nothing wrong.
If you subscribe to 2, then thats a much riskier line to walk because that affects a lot of things, not just gambling.
We clearly subscribe to option 2 in the United States. We don't allow access to medication based on your own volition. We don't allow access to medical procedures based on your own volition.
Option 2 is world wide. Unfortunately it seems to be the correct one if we want society to last. I don't think that humans have the internal machinery in their brains compatible with growing a society without strong oversight.
You frame as if agency exists, then exploitive coercion doesn't exist.
We can respect the agency of folks to smoke or drink, while also criminalizing lying to entire populations about the known health effects of your products.
We can respect people as having agency, while also acknowledging that psy-ops like those run by Cambridge Analytica, or even normal psy-ops like mass market advertising, can influence groups of people through deceptive or manipulative ways in aggregate and cause massive harms.
We can respect personal agency while also acknowledging some folks have addiction problems, addictions problems be intentionally manufactured by products and platforms. There is a balance between allowing a poker game, and allowing the MGM Grand to plant a limo driver in a recovering addict's driveway.
We can respect agency while acknowledging those with large reach because of wealth can cause mass harm through media, influence and coercion if unregulated.
We can grant authorities to police and politicians without Qualified Immunity from consequences of their actions.
1. If someone knows all the information, but still chooses to make the wrong decision.
2. Someone is being told wrong or incomplete information, leading them to make the wrong decision
3. Someone is being forced by external means into making an wrong decision.
Two and three are already illegal, under fraud and coersion.
Im solely talking about 1. Because if you don't believe people have full agency in that regard, you have to prove to what extent can you determine what is deception. You can't just willy nilly say that something feels immoral, and therefore should be banned.
You appear to be making the assertion that any economic exchange taken by two adults with full information is morally acceptable. Is that correct?
If so, would you accept the following as moral actions?
Financial adviser charging substantially above-market fees to recent widows, who lack experience in finance (All information is available, but not understood)
Selling heroin outside of a drug rehab clinic (All information available & understood, but under compromising circumstances)
>Financial adviser charging substantially above-market fees to recent widows, who lack experience in finance
As long as the financial advisers statement is along the lines of "this is the service I provide, these are my rates", with no lies about saying how his rates are the best or lying about what he can actually do, absolutely no problem.
That doesn't mean that he is of a moral upstanding character, but he certainly shouldn't be banned from setting his own price.
>Selling heroin outside of a drug rehab clinic (All information available & understood, but under compromising circumstances)
This one is tricky, because unlike online sports gambling, this ties into other things.
My answer would still be yes with the following caveats
* The heroin seller is FDA certified and not making the drug at home where he can accidentally mess it up and kill someone that is not expecting to die.
* We have a system of dealing with people effectively who turn to drugs. Id be 100% for state/government funded drug camps where anyone can either voluntarily enter, or get put there if their drug use causes them to be a public nuisance. They can stay there, get shelter and food and basic first aid for free, and get all the drugs they want, with 2 caveats: no advanced medical care (if you OD, or have a heart attack, you die), and the only way to leave is to go through a trial reintegration program where you get support for getting off drugs, get put to work, and do this for a year before being let out.
It means that you assume that the person is capable of rationally analyzing a situation, and making the best choice for themselves. And if that choice is financial ruin, than that is what they want, and if doesn't affect anyone else, they should be able to make that choice.
It is possible to believe that people have full agency and allow them to make wrong decisions, but in the case of wrong decisions about harmful addictive things where such people tend to later themselves wish they had not gone down that path also believe that we should not allow others to help them make that wrong decision.
Every man and woman and child for themselves! Cooperation and support are for weaklings.
More seriously, it seems like you have an uncommon view about good ways for people to relate to each other. You may recall that humans evolved to live in large, cooperative groups :)
> Are humans not in control of what they get addicted to?
When you see an attractive woman, do you have a choice about whether you think she's attractive?
I would say that is so instinctual as to not be a choice, even though different people have different opinions about who is attractive. And yet we know that men in particular go to great lengths to be with attractive women, some to the point where it becomes an obsession.
What about food? Do you not like things that have a bit of fat, sugar, and maybe some crunch to it? There are clearly people who, despite having all the necessary information, will eat too much, to the point where they become ill from it. How is that a choice?
Every decision that we make, at every moment in our lives, is exactly how an LLM chooses the next token to output - at the end of our thought chain, there is allways one that wins with the highest probability.
Its highlighted well in the psychological effect of tossing a coin when you are not sure about something, not to make the choice for you, but to see how you feel about the outcome, which tells you what you really want.
So for someone that overeats, and then feels ill, knowing that would happen, is simply a case of them valuing the enjoyment of food over feeling ill. If they were perfectly logical, without emotions, they would overeat, feel ill, and then not complain about feeling ill because they understood that they did it to themselves and this is a necessary sacrifice for the enjoyment of prior. But because humans are emotional we react to feeling ill with negative emotion, which externally makes it seem like we made the wrong choice, but we didnt.
You're treating the state as "we". It certainly claims to be "us", but that claim is - for most world states - partially, or entirely, invalid.
Also, on a semi-related note - there is the legality of gambling, the legality of running a gambling operation, and the legality of doing so for pecuniary gain, and it is possible for just part of these three to be illegal.
In my lifetime I've witnessed America accept new revenue sources by relaxing the moral code. First, it was allowing businesses to be open on Sunday. Then it was allowing liquor sales on Sunday. Then it was liquor ads on television. Then it was very controlled, state-run gambling (the lottery). Then it was casino gambling. Now it's online gambling and 'prediction markets'. Then it was recreational marijuana use. And so on. My point of reference is Missouri, where I grew up, but I think most states have followed a pretty similar path, all in search of new sources of revenue. I predict this trend will continue all the way to prostitution. Yes, that sounds crazy, but if you would've told me in the early-80s that Missouri would have casinos and legal weed, I would've considered that crazy.
I think legalizing cannabis was more about not jailing people for consuming a plant.
It's hard to respect a legal system that jails someone who wasn't hurting anyone. Repealing a law that criminalizes victimless behavior, especially when so many people already break it, paradoxically increases respect for other laws. It reinforces that the law serves a purpose: protecting people and promoting the general welfare.
There is no such thing as a victimless crime. Smoking marijuana has many many victims. I have personally seen enough people that smoked themselves stupid or into poverty that it hard for me to see it as a victimless crime. The issue was always that that laws and punishments were too lax.
> I have personally seen enough people that smoked themselves stupid or into poverty
We mostly don't criminalize self-harm. Is it really better for those people to be in prison, with violent criminals, and have a record, than be stupid or poor from too much smoking? Who does that help?
Drunk people get into accidents and fights and even commit murder. Cannabis users mostly stay home and snack. And yet we don't lock up people for buying a six-pack.
Cannabis isn't as chemically addictive as gambling.
Gambling is a victimless crime, if the gambler is a single person with no dependents. Most of the harms are when someone gambles away the family home or their kids' college funds.
Gambling is worse than cannabis. There's no limit, other than your credit, to how much money you can lose gambling. That's not true for cannabis. You can only consume so much and even grow it for free if you need to.
I support legalizing gambling too. Making all gambling illegal drives it underground and allows criminals to profit from it.
But I equally strongly oppose online gambling or gambling advertising (while we're on the subject, I think alcohol advertising shouldn't exist either). You can't smoke or drink anywhere, anytime. Why should gambling be any different? Go to an IRL casino or betting shop or racetrack and gamble. Regulate the hours and locations of these establishments.
Gambling, alcohol, and cannabis aren't good for you. So why allow them to be marketed to people? If they want to gamble (or drink or smoke) they'll find out about it and do it. No need to deliberately try to get people to do it.
You know prositution is already legal in certain counties in Nevada, and it's been that way since '71?
The list is far longer than you've mentioned.
Here's a list of things you're allowed to profit on either as an investor or as a participant that are quite wild: Fighting with gloves (more lethal than bare-knuckle), bare-knuckle fights, kids in contact sports (even combat sports), throwing away perfectly good food in order to lower taxable income, not planting a crop specifically because it wouldn't make enough profit, gig-economy not paying living wages, a minimum wage below living wage, predatory lending, algorithmic social media that swings elections, targetted advertisement psyops, marketing to children, cosmetic surgery in general but especially for children, forced conversion 'therapy', experimental life saving treatments gate-kept by money, planned obsolescence, plastic packaging...
In combat sports, we're really not too far removed from the collisuem, just that it's "not meant to be to the death" even though it does often result in death or lifelong conditions. The fighters get paid, the organizers get paid, the arena gets paid, the advertisers get paid...All in the name of watching someone not quite kill someone.
Hell, we've even still got slavery tucked neatly away behind "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.", but we know that many sitting in prison are demonstrably innocent. The prison is allowed to require that every inmate works. You're allowed to run an organization that profits from these slaves. You are not legally required to pay in some states.
Sorry but Sunday blue laws are religious discrimination. It’s just a day and businesses shouldn’t be restricted by a single religious sect. Gambling and substance abuse are actual public health issues.
I once observed ill-conceived online campaign to combat high gas prices by organizing a one-day boycott from purchasing gas. The intent was to send a message to oil suppliers. The problem is that not buying gas on Monday means drivers will just buy more gas on Tuesday -- delaying consumption instead of reducing it.
Blue laws are similar; they delay but do not reduce consumption. However, they have a fantastic pro-social side effect in that they allow workers in affected businesses a day off.
To this end, I would love to see a mid sized municipality experiment with raising minimum wage 10x one day a week and see what kind of culture develops around that.
Capital constantly needs new frontiers to exploit, and therefore must remove moral and social obstacles that stand in its way. Pseudo-prostitution has already been made widespread via platforms like OnlyFans, it's only a matter of time before in-the-flesh prostitution follows, as you said.
It's curious to me that so many progressives or soi-disant leftists are in favor of dissolving these types of moral and social traditions while being fervently anti-capitalist. It seems that they (meaning the subset who are always looking for new fenceposts to tear down) are in fact the shock troops of Capital.
And this is the sort of use of AI that ought to be regulated. But it's not as exciting as an AI going foom and cleansing the planet of the scientifically illiterate so it doesn't get traction.
Why regulate the AI bit instead of the behavior itself? If you don’t want people to exploit addiction, then outlaw that, rather than saying you just can’t use AI to exploit addictions.
why are we lumping marijuana and gambling together?
Marijuana is not zero harm, but guess what: Making it illegal is ALSO not zero harm. The drug war is an abject failure, US consumers have driven Mexico into a failed state with roving gangs of narcos who murder crowds of people with impunity.
"Studies say..." OK. Actually study weed then. Actually do clinical trials and apply science and tell us the actual results. Actually doing that has been prevented because it is a scheduled drug federally. So all we have is folk wisdom and half-baked one-off studies. "Linked to" has no scientific value, it is a term the news uses to scare people.
I think people should be informed and be allowed to make their own choices, as opposed to creating a huge and tyrannical law enforcement agency that will ruin a kids life for carrying a plant around.
Always funny how conservatives are the party of freedom, unless it's something they don't like.
What do you expect? They thrive on addicts. No different than NYSE:META, and NYSE:RDDT, and NYSE:BUD and NYSE:TAP and NYSE:(fill in whatever proven-to-be-addicting product you want)
And I would add... There is a sophisticated ecosystem of profiling and psycho-managing potential addicts from before they've even signed up.
Affiliates, data brokers, dodgy media inventory, credit bureaus, specialised CRMs (known to be leading edge on segmentation and ROI prediction) etc. etc.
I used to work in adtech and someone in sales told me that DraftKings and FanDuel did not like being referred to as gambling companies. They always wanted to convince people that it wasn't gambling, even though it's so obvious that's what it is.
This is out of date. They didn’t like to be referred to as gambling companies when it was just daily fantasy sports. There was legitimate debate as to how much of daily fantasy sports was skill and that mattered to its legality in many states. There’s no debate over whether sportsbook betting is gambling.
On a related note: Brasil has just passed a bill to ban gambling platforms and “””influencers””” are crying left right and centre for losing their sweet sweet sponsor blood money. Music to the ears, almost.
Online dating apps do the same exact thing. When you try to disengage they spam you with notifications and emails saying a bunch of people want to talk to you.
You actually login or god forbid pay for a subscription, all of your matches are disabled bot accounts. I actually have a theory that daiting apps are responsible for a significant portion if not most of those bots.
I’m actually more willing to work on a gambling or prediction product vs a dating app.
This should come as no surprise to anybody. They have every incentive to exploit those who can't resist their offering. Gambling is the new tobacco industry.
They'll always do this. It's not even "AI" it's just a boring old ML model.
Money Stuff did a great bit on this a few days ago. There's 2 functions inside DraftKings:
- Fin the most lucrative customers, to keep engaging them.
- Finds addicted gamblers, to get them help to quit gambling.
These are the same people.
Sure, yeah, there's a nice little story about gambling within your means, blah blah. But if you're optimizing your gambling app, you're going to find and create problematic gambling as the core objective.
AI, ML, whatever. It's a gambling company. It targets gamblers. It probably shouldn't exist.
Michael Lewis did a similar series for one of the seasons of his podcast.
What amazed me was that Chris Christie (then governor of NJ) used state money to fund SIX consecutive lawsuits trying to get online gambling legalized in New Jersey.
meanwhile, free-to-play gaming's business model is to speedrun through the population via ads to find the most mentally unwell or underdeveloped people with access to credit cards or at least grandmothers who will buy them gift cards
I worked in a large and well known online casino as a technical account manager. I promise you, for all the "responsible gaming" stuff they have written everywhere, if a big account decides to stop playing (let's say they just want a break from gambling), their personal am will be arranging free trips and vip treatment to keep them on the tables. I have seen it happen and it disgusted me. I no longer work for such companies
If you are vetting a romantic partner or a business partner, I would strongly urge you to check their phone. If they have DraftKings or FanDuel installed... run. Some might even say they lose some but it's for entertainment. I'd still trust them less than a social heroin user.
You will find a lot of people who will tell you they win at these things. They don't. How do I know this? Because if you win consistently, they kick you off. You're bad for business because the pigeons need to win occasionally to keep playing (and losing).
Gambling (and I include Kalshi and Polymarket here) shouldn't be this accessible. Back when you had to go to a casino, it was still bad but that barrier prevented a lot of harm. Being able to gamble away your future and your family's future from the comfort of your phone simply shouldn't be allowed.
I know people who place bets fairly regularly (weekly during their favorite sports seasons) and they have been making profits yearly. You're not going to get banned for making hundreds of dollars in profit. I'm not saying these guys are making good decisions or should even keep doing it, but I have seen their activity statements.
you absolutely can get banned for making hundreds in profits! Has happened to several people I know (maybe the flag for them was having a v obvious pattern).
What I've learned in life is how much people lie. They may not intentionally lie. They may just be wrong.
As an example, if anybody tells you their commute to work is 25 minutes, it's more likely 45 minutes. "It takes me 10 minutes to get to X" really means 20. I don't know what it is but people just don't get this right.
It's way worse when it comes to money. "My income is $X" literally means "My income is 0.3X to 0.7X". I need to see employment contracts and W2s before I believe you what you say about your salary. People will even lie anonymously (eg on surveys). It's like they need to believe it themselves.
So when you say you have friends who net win hundreds of dollars, unless you've seen P&Ls, I don't believe them. And I'm sure these sites don't make it easy to figure out your total P&L because then you might stop. People will remember and boast about their wins and downplay or just plain forget their losses. They'll minimize losses and exaggerate wins. It's just human nature.
Ever notice how no gambler says they consistently lose? Everyone is somehow a winner? Isn't that sus?
>And I'm sure these sites don't make it easy to figure out your total P&L because then you might stop.
That's just not true. Fanduel for example shows your lifetime win/loss statement ("career stats") prominently on your account page, including your Net Total in a large number right on top that is impossible to miss or ignore.
Most people lose, because you are paying a vig, so you have to win ~60% of your bets just to break even, but that doesn't mean everyone loses - they certainly don't. This is evidenced by the fact that people who routinely win from the sportsbooks can and do get banned.
>You will find a lot of people who will tell you they win at these things. They don't. How do I know this? Because if you win consistently, they kick you off.
This is only true in some cases and entirely depends on your form of gambling. Draftkings and Fanduel both run "daily fantasy" and sportbooks, and they are quite different. If you win consistently enough on the sportsbook, then you are taking money from the house, and they will ban you. The "daily fantasy" gambling on the other hand, works on a paramutual basis where they take their profits off the top. For example they will take 20% of the total prize pool regardless of who ends up winning or losing. Much like the track when it comes to horse racing, they don't care who wins or loses because they are getting the same % either way, and the more volume there is the more money they make.
I wish gambling was outlawed entirely. Let bookies run it in some crack dens, I don't care about that, but every single gambling ad I see in the open is infuriating for me like no other ads. It's been seeping into sports commentary and even news on TV, "oh I don't think we have a full picture of the situation Kalshi has it at 60%", die in a fire. It's comparable to scammers preying on grandma.
No, I don't care about the "but liberty!" arguments.
Another perfect example of why we don't need new laws, we "simply" need to enforce them. Supposedly, Dark Patterns are illegal. If the corporation had to tell you how they use your data, would you let them?
DraftKings: Hi we're going to give you extra incentives!
User: Hmm, sounds like I might like that. How do I get them?
DraftKings: You have to lose constantly! And then when you start winning, we take them away! You like that, don't you?
User: No.
Dark Pattern. No new rules needed. "Just" enforcement.
"Coined in 2010 by user design specialist Harry Brignull, the term 'dark patterns' has been used to describe design practices that trick or manipulate users into making choices they would not otherwise have made and that may cause harm."
Not sure if this reference to a definition is the same thing as saying it's the legal definition, but this is at least in a document as /a/ definition on the Federal Trade Commission's website.
Are you asking me to see how this mechanism applies to this definition?
My question was more like this: There is some statutory basis for enforcement. If "dark patterns" is itself a basis for enforcement, there's some legal definition of it, and I'm curious to know how that's operationalized, since the definition given here doesn't seem precise enough to be legally actionable.
At the end of the FTC doc, there's this statement:
> Firms that nonetheless employ dark patterns, take notice: where these practices violate the FTC Act, ROSCA, the TSR, TILA, CAN-SPAM, COPPA, ECOA, or other statutes and regulations enforced by the FTC, we will continue to take action.
This implies that dark patterns themselves are not a cause for action and some other specific law or regulation needs to be violated in order for the FTC to act.
I'm going to assume you want to know how this is a dark pattern per the definition I found and put in the other response I gave: "design practices that trick or manipulate users into making choices they would not otherwise have made and that may cause harm."
Per the EFF link, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/draftkings-using-ai-su... : "Once found, DraftKings sends these customers targeted advertising designed to lure them back to the site to place more bets—bets that DraftKings thinks will be losing ones."
A good analogy might be asking if a restaurant has any "specials."
I've read that some unscrupulous restaurants will make the "special" whatever is not so fresh and they want to get rid of. And for some restaurants, that might mean something that is really starting to go rotten. Something no amount of sauce or spices will redeem it. In fact, just about anything else on the menu would be better.
But a scrupulous restaurant will make the "special" something that is really, well, special. A new recipe they just perfected and the ingredients are actually especially fresh and in season. And its because of these scrupulous restaurants that people still ask what the specials are.
A promo at a gambling site might actually be presented because they want you, the user, to have a good time. It could be ambivalent to whether you are doing good or bad at betting. These are "specials" that are actually special.
And, in fact, I think most people would prefer it was ambivalent. You almost certainly wouldn't like to know the site is happy in the fact that you lost money on your bets and now hopes you lose even more. Can you imagine if DraftKings said "Congratulations! You seem exactly like the kind of sucker and compulsive gambler that makes us the most money! Since you are losing so much money, we are giving you a promo on this bet that we think you are especially likely to lose money on! The more you lose the more we win! Please lose more by clicking here!" Since there is no such language, this is the rotten fish "special."
Similarly, social media's algorithms /could/ give make most prominent the posts that make you happiest and most contented. This would be "specials" that are special.
But we know they don't. They make prominent that which will make you angry and isolated and sad. They know this, and they don't put "PROMOTED: We think you'll hate this, and we want you to see it, because we think the more miserable you are, the more you'll use us!" This is the rotten fish "special."
It's all Dark Patterns. No new laws needed. "Just" enforcement.
I would be surprised if this was not already systemic and endemic across the retail space preying on people who have compulsive spending, gambling issues.
Really this is the entire economy now, giant companies that have billions invested in mass surveillance and heavily min-maxed dark patterns targeting the wallet of the average unsuspecting consumer. Nonsense subscriptions that are impossible to cancel, replacing ownership with "license", customized pricing, endless advertising, zero customer service, shrinkwrap licenses that change daily, etc etc etc.
Of course it is. That's where they make their money. In other news, the local drug dealer is targeting drug addicts and the bar still serves the alcoholic who has destroyed his family and is drinking himself to death.
Of course they are. They're also doing things like offering big sign up incentives with long play-through requirements (you know, the "200 in bonus bets when you deposit $5" thing) to try to get people to download it, gamble a bunch, and become addicts. Some people play it through, take the $20 thats left, and they're done. But some people start playing more regularly. Its all extraordinarily predatory and I'm pissed off every time I see a PrizePicks billboard on my commute. This stuff shouldn't even be legal.
It's so incredibly sad that gambling is such a widespread industry, even supported on a state level. It's rather conclusively a tax on the poor. It preys on desperation and lack of statistical understanding. I'm immediately suspect of anyone that supports it.
We need to see the kind of regulation of these apps and websites that you see with state gambling control boards. If you need to present ID to walk onto a casino floor, you should need one to log onto these services. Each time. You should be able to ban yourself at the device account level. The odds need to be regulated.
Why wouldn't they? We have no consumer protections so this type of thing is happening everywhere all the time on every level of society.
People with personality disorders, depression, anxiety, etc. all algorithmically being plied for attention. It's disgusting and nobody is doing anything about it, which will eventually erode buy-in in the system until someone is willing to let it all go without an adversary even firing a shot.
ProPublica had one of their reports work with gambling addition experts to see how DraftKings would respond to someone presenting signs of a gambling problem. It's a hell of a read, and makes it clear that this company is full of people with absolutely no ethics whatsoever.
https://www.propublica.org/article/draftkings-sports-gamblin...
People in companies that are a negative public good are by definition unethical. I'm not surprised by anything they do. The real problem is how we've let these companies infiltrate so much of our society so fast. I can't consume any ad supported media without getting some ad about them. This company really defines the phrase "money talks"
They're built on adtech, which people don't understand.
You have many adtech online dossiers that are basically a virtual you, that can be poked, prodded and studied for interests and behaviors.
for a very minimal look, maybe check out amazon "about you":
https://www.amazon.com/slc/hub?useAiMode=1
Yet I keep getting ads in Spanish on Amazon Prime video and nobody in our household understands that language. We don't listen to Mexican polka music or watch telenovelas with subtitles, we don't have Spanish-speaking help, there is literally zero Spanish in our house. And it's not Spanish-only ads, it's usually big telco (T-Mobile now, some other before) or car ads, which sometimes run in English version. The list at the link is primarily a collection of the random facts from reviews for me, so it knows a lot about my cats but not much about me. Feel pretty comfy if this is the SOTA of adtech.
Neighbors and thin walls perhaps?
Live in a house, there are some Mexican polka aficionados driving their low-riders down the street (I live in Texas) but it only reaches inside as base. Even if Amazon could have found the music they play by matching the rhythm, it does not look like a smart decision to target Spanish ads on this basis. Other than Prime Video, which I don't use quite often, I subscribe to Audible and Kindle, with perhaps 1000 of titles between these two. None in Spanish.
Spotify has the same issue (they play ads in podcasts despite paying for subscription) but I don't know if their ads are just local ads made in Spanish only (I live in Texas) since I have no clue what they advertise. They also play ads in what I believe is Canadian French because it does not sound quite like French (which I also don't know but can understand a bit better than Spanish).
"Mexican Polka" is Tejano music; it got its Polka roots from Germans that settled there but is its own thing and it is FRICKIN' AMAZING.
You actually made me look: according to Wikipedia it was brought by a Mexican Emperor, Maximilian I (former archduke of Austria, brother of Franz Joseph of the World War I fame). Don't care about this kind of music but somehow I never learned that Mexico had not one, but two empires among other things between the modern federal state and a Spanish colony.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norte%C3%B1o_(music)#Origins
Interestingly it said absolutely nothing about all the sex toys and fetish clothing I buy. Something tells me this is only the tip of the iceberg.
I wouldn't be surprised if they actually filtered those out of your ad target model. Most people don't care if advertisers know they like cooking, but not so much their fetishes
I deleted everything from the "about you" page and still get pretty much hte same recommendations.
Unless proven otherwise I assume any delete button in 2026 is just
How many shadow accounts do you think Amazon has to try and track people who don't have an Amazon account?
One reason privacy laws are a joke. We are not tracking you directly, indirectly and in accordance with the law.
I would assume it’s worse
“SET pretend_to_hide_due_to_customer_shame = true”, lol.
No way they’d not use THAT as a training metric too.
I suspect this is "about you - that you won't choke on"
"And we know you would like that, dirty dog"
That wasn't really alarming to me, "Likely reads diverse literary fiction." Nice.
But what _was_ alarming was this persistent banner on the page: "Your other AI assistants have learned about you. Bring that knowledge here for an even more personalized experience."
Okay...so let's click *Import* and see what this is all about...
Step 1: Copy [prompt](https://gist.github.com/jenh/dcad304585e23fccc50ac514bc3605c...).
(!!!)
Step 2: Log into your AI assistant and paste it in.
(?!, okay, let's see what we get...)
Step 3: Paste AI assistant's response. Submit the response from your AI assistant below. We will remember the information you share to improve your experience across Amazon services. *To protect your privacy, we may not save all of the information you submit.*
How about...don't do this at all, or at the very least, please ask users to review the returned response for things they might not want to share with Amazon.
What a strange, hokey, non-vetted, and privacy-violating feature...
"About you
We haven't saved anything yet. As you shop on Amazon or chat with Alexa, we'll save helpful information to personalise your experience.
Once we have saved some details, you can manage them here."
I've had that account since ... well, I can see orders back to 2011.
Wow, that is wild.
"Is an expert at making pasta salad"
I am pretty good. I forgot I got those ingredients at WF. I guess it liked that recipe.
Fascinating that mine says it has nothing! I've ordered so much from amazon too, wild.
I pulled that info from a full export of my Amazon data and...
"Customer indicated they are currently in the Pacific Ocean" - "Amazon has medium confidence in the validity of this memory"
Well, then. I guess trying to break Alexa for Shopping by telling it I was in the middle of the English Channel really broke my "about you".
I also had managed to update my About You in weird ways - I got it to accept some kind of variant of "is a gold rewards subscriber of Jeff's Benzos powered by PillPack" and it agreed that was a valid service when I later asked it and guardrailed itself at the same time:
https://i.ibb.co/Fkh94dv9/photo-2026-08-24-11-22-27.jpg
Uh oh:
Hobbies and interests: Collects jelly beans systematically
I guess that's what I get for buying 4 different types of jelly beans one time.
Holy heck.
> Systematically completes series once started
> Likely listens to music or audio content with critical attention
Our representatives both dem and republican (but slightly more Republican) have decided that the mountain of data that for profit companies have on is a benefit overall to the economy and we’re the guinea pigs for psychological experiments - the “American consumer” is the #1 commodity the US mines.
Which would shed all those grand visions from tech tycoons about a fully UBI-financed "pure consumer" economy in a different light: "We couldn't care less about jobs, but guinea pigs - we need lots of those!"
Jobs == costs.
Guinea pigs == potential consumers/revenue.
Seems obvious?
Not completely, in a scenario where the same companies would also finance UBI. But I guess "UBI costs" could be easier controlled than salaries.
Zero chance those same companies would fund UBI. Even the tech mogul brain trust never hinted that would happen. It was always ‘society’.
The cattle class!
We are unethical for letting it get to the state it has. The voters define the phrase "money talks".
You're diluting responsibility with this comparison and it doesn't help.
You're trying to compare the people who actively build and support these platforms knowing full well what they're doing, with the people who go to vote for lower taxes or more jobs... oh and this hidden lobby agreement to not hurt gambling platforms. If you as a voter think these two things are at the same level by all means, call yourself a shitstain and I won't get in your way.
But nobody votes on these matters, they just come bundled (and hidden for 99.99% of people) under the broad political agenda of a handful of elected representatives who mostly focus their platform on economy, military, etc. not betting sites. This isn't any candidate's platform header. The voter is at best ignorant to these hidden issues. And even if voters did vote on this directly, it's not an obligation for anyone to actively support and contribute.
People choose to build and support platforms which are 100% harmful for anyone but themselves and the shareholders. And they should be chastised. They're free to build whatever fits their moral values, we should all be allowed to criticize according to ours even if you think the blame should be spread across 150 million voters for whatever reason.
The gambling platforms are a new thing in the US, voted on at each state in the past few years. For example, in california it was a proposition back in 2022 (proposition 27 i think, which was defeated thankfully). Several states put it directly to vote.
We are responsible, and it doesn't appear you have any understanding of how it all came about.
All the hard work of the people who suffered and fought to achieve this wisdom only for it to be abandoned.
Generations making the same mistakes over and over even with boundless knowledge at our fingertips. Really showcases how important education and especially reverence for education is.
> Automatic weapons ban lifted
Weirdly, you still have a ban on sniper rifles and on AP rounds.
What automatic weapons ban got lifted? Asking for a friend.
This includes a large portion of big tech workers, many of whom reading this.
Prediction markets seemed like a possible exception to the rule that anything to do with betting is always a scourge on the commons, but those companies quickly realized sports gambling is the best way to rake in cash, so they all converge on it.
I am one of the very few people in the United States who actually does still earnestly believe prediction markets do in principle serve an immense social good that can't be provided in any other way: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq
Just, in practice, Polymarket and Kalshi are (unsurprisingl)y run by people who solely care about how much revenue they could ever possibly inhale.
And everything else about them is so unethical and so destructive to the commons I would support them being metaphorically razed to the ground.
Like, just the Kalshi and Polymarket Twitter accounts alone contribute more to disinformation (disinformation, not misinformation) than Alex Jones could ever dream of. And then all the accounts affiliated with them make it 1000x worse. And then they have so many other unbelievable scandals I'd have to write a wall of text to list them all. Tons of egregiously machiavellian, intelligence agency-tier tactics and operations.
The only prediction markets that seem to be mostly upside with minimal downside are the ones that do not accept real money.
I've always wondered if you could solve most of the negatives by imposing a "money in per year" limit on online gambling. Let's say, you can only transfer in 1000 dollars per year or something; maybe it's a federal limit tracked to your SSN or required to be declared on your tax forms or something. You can of course transfer OUT as much money as you win, and carry over any earnings to next year without affecting the limit. But aside from people for whom 1000 dollars a year is a huge deal, you avoid the worst harms. The people who benefit the most and eventually become disproportionately represented in the pool are superforcasters who can consistently turn a profit by being smarter and better at predicting stuff than everybody else.
An idealized prediction market could be a social good the same way a frictionless spherical cow is good for making my physics homework easier.
There is no way to remove the incentive for people with the ability to alter the events being bet on. Insider trading is generally considered a bad thing for the stock market because of the non symmetrical information for everyone trading but all of sudden in the past few years a cohort of people(rationalists) have found it virtuous
I think the thing is insider trading genuinely is exactly part of how prediction markets contribute something that was not offered before: a more accurate way for the public to gauge the probability of future outcomes. I, as a rationalist, think there is a lot of good that results from that.
It just happens to almost always be the case that the bad greatly outweighs the good, and it usually just leads to things like brazen war profiteering (+ plan-leaking that jeopardizes operations, in the event the military operations were perhaps for a morally net good cause).
Yea, like I said. We all understood this as a bad thing and why. Then the rationalists came around and reasoned their way into how vice is a virtue.
Seriously, the so called rationalists seem to be working very hard to be as weird as possible. Some sort of pathological contrarianism.
They know they are rational because they are rationalists. If they decide an idea is good it must be rational.
Before any of their defenders(and I’m including e/acc and most of TESCREAL in this criticism) come at me about how much introspection they do and how they constantly try to question their theories or be LessWrong you’ll have to explain things like prediction markets, Bankman-Fried, or the litany of other warped ideas coming out of this group that are causing harm to society.
How does that even work?
An insider doesn’t make their bets known until they are certain they can take advantage of it. The whole point of the move is to predate on the rubes.
In all the cases of insider trading I have been aware of, I have never once heard this argument, until that interview with a prediction market CEO.
The whole point of insider trading is to ensure an unfair trade. The moment you enshrine unfairness as a core tenet of your market place, it loses price discovery capability, ensuring that the surplus is captured by manipulation not performance.
You are empirically correct, but one could likely design a prediction market that resolves this while still making insider trading an informational public good. Unfairness to counterparties is a different axis from non-monetary public forecasting signals.
Because it’s targeting gambling addicts as the rubes.
When you have shit like will the government attack X nation by 9:00 pm on Friday, it takes very little for the insiders with levers to decide if the event in question is going to happen, to make the event happen.
It’s beyond even regular corporate insider trading which was usually predicated on secret information, not the literal ability to decide if an event occurs.
Prediction market is undistinguishable from unregulated gambling in literally all its aspects.
Gambling is for games of chance, while one can "beat the house" in prediction markets simply by being more intelligent, informed, and better at forecasting.
At least for the non-random-like bets.
I wish the ads were restricted to ad-supported media instead of arriving in the mail. I don't know what better evidence I need to avoid them than by how fucking aggressive they are about finding new suckers and offering money to help grease the slide into gambling addiction.
This falls under the umbrella of "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism". Everything you do supports somebody who's doing something bad. There's really no way to avoid it. Heck, it was even a plot point on The Good Place.
The issue is that our economic system is coercive. You need a job. Now this doesn't excuse you from doing any job but you also need to live.
Take the big tech companies. They're essentially military contractors now. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc are functionally no different to RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
But should you treat someone who works on Android the same as someone who works out on AI systems for military targeting? Probably not. Also, Palantir is fundamentally more evil than any of these tech companies. So it's tricky.
I do agree that online gambling as a whole is deeply unethical. There is no positive byproduct of this. Your salary is paid by people losing money, probably through addiction. And yes, you can say people have free will but you're still preying on and growing addiction.
>The issue is that our economic system is coercive. You need a job.
That's hardly the problem of the economic system, and more of a underlying problem with the the universe (ie. entropy and all).
When people say “the problem is that our economic system…”, I’ve stared to simply ask, “which economic system is the one where you do not need a job?”
One that isn't built on debt bondage and a massive wealth transfer to the old and wealthy. Student debt, housing debt and medical debt are all designed to keep you a complaint worker who will increasingly never escape that debt. We have increasingly just replaced the dukes and kings of old with centibillionaires. Together we're bouldering towards what many of us call "neofeudalism".
This is one thing that Karl Marx and Adam Smith agreed on: landlords are parasitic that reduce economic output. It's another way we're returning to a virtual aristocracy as land gets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
This is all going to further fall apart once we don't need everyone to be employed. Arguably we're already there. What are the rest of the people meant to do? Starve and die? At some point you realize the only way forward is to collectively own the wealth you help create.
>This is one thing that Karl Marx and Adam Smith agreed on: landlords are parasitic that reduce economic output.
But going back to the original premise, everyone still has to work, even without landlords. The soviets even codified it as a crime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_parasitism_(offense)
We will eventually reach the point where not everyone needs a job. Many basic functions of life like agriculture and food production will be automated. Construction will probably be automated.
AI is being used to reduce the labor pool to suppress wages. You not only save on wages for laid off people but the remaining workers need their jobs and won't be asking for raises. They'll probably be doing extra unpaid work to boot.
If 20% of the workforce is no longer necessary, society as it stands now will collapse. That's the point.
Your moral compass seems to be very close to some very powerful magnets
> This falls under the umbrella of "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism".
No it doesn't. There is a time and place for the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" mantra, but increasingly (as is the case with your comment) it is being deployed as piece of whataboutism to distract from clearly unethical behavior by implying it is no worse than anything else. There's actually a massive difference between businesses which have complicated tradeoffs in the means of delivering what is basically a social good, and facilitating sports gambling, a negative-sum activity which ruins people's lives for basically no upside whatsoever.
(It's deeply ironic that a slogan originally coined by socialists has found its most use by capitalists trying to get off the hook for their actions, but I guess most rebellious anti-establishment sentiments are ultimately co-opted for profitable ends.)
Is any form of entertainment or art a social good?
People can get "addicted" to practically any type of entertainment in that they spend a massive chunk of their time on it to the point it stifles their development.
Is sports gambling worse than f2p games? Are f2p games worse than regular video games? Is someone addicted to video games worse than someone addicted to reading fantasy novels? What about smutty novels?
I'm not sure is disagree with you but I think it is hard to start drawing these lines without saying you are now the arbiter of good art and bad art and you can ban some forms of art if you don't like them and have decided they are bad.
Now are you just banning things you don't like because you point to the societal harms as a fig leaf defense that could be applied to the art you do like as well?
Luckily all those companies have done tons of research to exactly qualify and quantify exactly this. Those companies don't seem to have problems identifying those addictive mechanisms, why should the government?
Yes, banning video games would probably be a win for society.
No, you probably won’t get anyone to admit to that here.
So would banning air travel, but such an example is purely to highlight how subjective “a win for society” is.
> I'm not sure is disagree with you but I think it is hard to start drawing these lines without saying you are now the arbiter of good art and bad art
There's a super easy line to draw actually and it has nothing to do with art
Are you selling a product or an experience?
If you're talking about someone addicted to fantasy novels or video games, they are addicted to products.
If you're talking about someone addicted to opening Magic the Gathering booster packs, or videogame loot boxes, or sports gambling, or prediction markets, they are addicted to experiences. In the case of loot boxes they are experiences shaped like products but the addiction is about the experience of opening the box, not really whatever is inside
So.. easier than you seem to think
Of course once lawyers get involved they'll quibble over this shit until the sun goes out
Is selling a ticket to a movie an experience, or a product? Is a subscription to netflix a ticket or an experience? What about a subscription to world of warcraft?
If you paid for world of warcraft by the hour does that change if it is an experience or a product?
This doesn't really work because products and experiences have too much overlap.
What you are really against I think is the different ways in which we are gift wrapping a skinner box, but there are an infinite number of ways to wrap it that will bypass your specification system.
> there are an infinite number of ways to wrap it that will bypass your specification system.
Which will matter to no one except lawyers
When most people smell shit they don't care if it's rat shit or cat shit, they just know it smells bad
Is any form of entertainment or art a social good?
People can get "addicted" to practically any type of entertainment in that they spend a massive chunk of their time on it to the point it stifles their development.
Is sports gambling worse than f2p games? Are f2p games worse than regular video games? Is someone addicted to video games worse than someone addicted to reading fantasy novels? What about smutty novels?
I'm not sure is disagree with you but I think it is hard to start drawing these lines without saying you are now the arbiter of good art and bad art and you can ban some forms of art if you don't like them and have decided they are bad.
Now are you just banning things you don't like because you point to the societal harms as a fig leaf defense that could be applied to the art you do like as well?
Is it the % of people who show addictive tendencies to a piece of art/entertainment how we define if it is good or bad?
Is the morality of a form of entertainment defined by how many users show problematic consumption habits, such that in some populations an entertainment product is a moral good and in others it isn't? Is morality that flexible?
You’re setting up lots of straw men here but it’s not a complicated argument.
Most people feel this is deeply wrong at a gut level and I agree with them. Targeting and squeezing addicts is not moral behaviour.
I agree with that, but if you don't have a coherent set of rules for why we are doing what we are doing, you just become an arbiter of right and wrong that can't be questioned.
Which is a whole lot like saying your preferences are legal and if you don't like something you can arbitrarily make it illegal because you dislike it and therefore it is immoral. That kind of rationale could be used to ban television or videogames outright.
Do any of these industries maintain dossiers on the psychological fault lines of their victims so they can screw them out of extra cash until they're either insane, bankrupt, or both?
Ok, so is it intent that matters then?
So if they didn't keep those dossiers would that make them an ethical sports gambling company even if a high percentage of their users showed problematic usage patterns?
To give you some perspective. When I was in drug rehab beside people addicted to substances there was a handful of people with gambling problems. And it was very clear that those are the same kind of issue even if delivery mechanism is different.
Gambling rides on the same pathways that make substances fucking with dopaminergic system addictive.
It's not "addictive", it's addictive.
No. It isn't.
They don't get physically ill if they stop gambling to the point of needing hospitalization for the extreme pain it causes.
They don't have to gamble even when they don't want to in order to stave off getting very sick.
medications that are addictive for real vs really wanting to play a game and feeling the dopamine urge....
They aren't the same thing at all, because one of them is something you want to do, and one of them is something you maybe don't want to do but you need to do it because the consequences of not doing it are so extreme.
You’re drawing a line between physical and emotional/mental addiction. You are correct that they differ. That doesn’t imply one is not an addiction. It’s similar to comparing the levels of Maslow’s hierarchy.
The difference between gambling and any other compulsion or addiction is that only gambling can leave you broke and destitute in a single day, without regard for starting wealth. Maybe findom, but going completely broke is generally not the purpose.
The difference between drugs and other addictions is that (certain) drugs greatly increase the risk of death.
So I say let's divide it in two - addictions that can kill you or leave you in financial ruin in a single evening, and those that cannot.
f2p games and tv shopping network addictions absolutely leave a significant number of people destitute.
There are many other hobbies/forms of entertainment that can easily consume significant resources and leave some % of their userbase in serious financial trouble/ruin their lives.
Also you seem to want to define whether a hobby/form of entertainment is moral or immoral based on how expensive it is. So if a slot machine had a lower max bet it would become moral?
F2P games can absolutely be made to exploit the same mechanics as real gambling, and are often designed to do so. But no matter what they do, they're just not as potent as real money gambling. The pull isn't the same when it's not done with real cash, they tend to be less ruthless and it seems that a smaller proportion of people is potentially susceptible to F2P addiction compared to real gambling. For the right people, they can be very wallet-draining but it doesn't seem many go into homelessness like with gambling.
What's a "TV shopping network addiction"? I tried searching it, and I can only find isolated news articles from 5-15 years ago that report on it purely because of how unusual this is. Going to file this under 'people can get behaviorally addicted to anything', what a strange example. Do you even know anyone who has bought anything from a TV shopping network, let alone a 'significant number' that are left destitute?
The reason why people disagree with you is because the hair-splitting between different types of addictions seems very pedantic. Clearly people think that gambling addiction is not even on the same scale of addiction than the other examples. If F2P games are cocaine, then gambling is heroin. There is a reason why gambling is taking over Western economies so rapidly, but not any of those other things - it's just too good at exploiting people's brains. So when gambling addiction is so potent that it goes off the chart compared to any of the dozens of other things that can be psychologically addictive, people aren't particularly interested in finding the exact point where it's too much for society to bear - they just know that gambling is far beyond that point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_addiction
I'm not splitting hairs. It seems like we are just talking about outlawing things if we decide too large a % of the population engages with something in a problematic way.
This is certainly pragmatic, but not a framework based on morality or freedom. We're just being a nanny state forbidding the vast majority of people from doing something because a small minority of people don't have self control.
Maybe that sounds harsh, but it is accurate.
I'd prefer people were honest about it instead of trying to wrap it in the clothing of morality, when it has nothing to do with any kind of morality that makes sense.
Heck no. This is a version of the slippery slope fallacy.
People can’t get addicted to practically any type of entertainment. There is a range of susceptibility to gambling, amongst “people”.
We have an extensive range of rules and regulations that apply to gambling, and to things that have odds and payout schedules.
It took a while, but eventually lootboxes in games were recognized as a blight, and regulation is addressing their impact.
Generalizing entertainment from gambling is a huge stretch.
It's really not a slippery slope, we just don't recognize addictions as such when we see them.
People engage with social media in an addictive manner every day. People sit around watching tv for 5+ hours a day. People do the same with videogames.
There are even people who cluster themselves away reading books in a way that is harmful to their lives and well being.
The only reason we recognize gambling is because the impact is so much more intense and visibly harmful.
All of these things are addictions though, so is qanon and conspiracy rabbit holes and those do have serious and rapid effects, and even that gets a pass.
You can see serious addictions in tons of people, even workaholics, and we just look the other way because it is less immediately harmful to society. Not because any of these addictions are more or less immoral.
Yes they can be, and gambling is definitely a different psychological mechanism with different financial outcomes than hobbies or collecting.
I have heard that boating and aviation have similar financial financial outcomes to gambling. Keep in mind that the majority (way more than 50%) of people can engage with gambling safely, it is a minority that get into trouble
> I have heard that boating and aviation have similar financial financial outcomes to gambling.
But is that because you're betting at the repair shop to pull a mint condition replacement engine for your plane, or because people find a way in by paying a bearable upfront cost and then find themselves drowning in unexpected additional expenses associated with these hobbies far beyond the price of a boat or plane? To me it seems like the second one, so it's not a very useful comparison to gambling, it's just a lack of knowledge, foresight and financial literacy.
The gambling industry keeps refining their strategies all the time, new technologies have been a godsend to them. So I wouldn't rely on statistics all too much, because their goal is to use all psychological tricks that can be exploited in our brains to make us make the wrong decision and head down that path. Their effectiveness increases, and so are the depths to which they can get people to sink in their addictions. If you can engage with it safely right now, that is no predictor of how you'll react to the state of gambling in 3, 5 or 10 years. It's like as if the alcohol industry was allowed to invent brand new drugs and sell them without any oversight, targeting maximum potency and addiction and constantly refining their formulations.
f2p games and tv shopping network addictions absolutely leave a significant number of people destitute.
There are many other hobbies/forms of entertainment that can easily consume significant resources and leave some % of their userbase in serious financial trouble/ruin their lives.
Also I'm not sure it is correct to define morality by trying to connect how expensive a hobby/form of entertainment to whether it is immoral.
Not at all in comparison to gambling, and the F2P model is a scourge which gamers themselves pointed out was poisonous. Regulation has increasingly been catching up to it.
We have an entire science built around gambling, and we know how to titrate the payoffs and reward schedules to get people increasingly addicted.
Our movies/stories aren’t actively (yet) changing themselves to maximize their ability to keep you pressing coins into a slot, or when to string you along.
Bowling with friends?
Many people enjoy gambling, and relatively few have a "problem", so "negative public good" is doing a lot of work there. DraftKings may indeed by unethical, but that doesn't mean that all or even most others are.
In my state (Massachusetts), the number of people who call in to the state’s gambling problem hotline doubled after online sports books became legalized. That is, by definition, a negative effect on the public good. The net number of people seeking help for gambling problems increased by 100%.
It’s definitely bad that twice as many people have a gambling problem. However to assess the NET impact you also have to count how much value/fun/whatever the non-problem-gamblers are having, plus whatever tax revenues you get, increased economic activity from more attention on sports, etc.
Personally I think these companies suck. Just need more work to make a strong good faith argument about it.
I think an important question to ask is: how much of a company's income comes from harmful use?
Gambling (and some other industries, in particular alcohol) come out so bad on this metric, you can practically let the industry define excessive use themselves. In order to claim most of their money comes from "healthy normal entertainment use" or similar, they'd have to claim absurd things, such as that drinking a bottle of whisky per day or spending your entire paycheck each month on slots can be healthy, normal use.
My problem with sports gambling is that all these companies are lying. If you win a lot you get (the gambling equivalent of) shadow banned[1]. The provider pretends they're providing a game where you can "win big" and it's all up to your knowledge of sports, but the reality is that it's a skewed playing field where you can either lose or lose more.
The common industry explanation is that this is because they would be unprofitable if they allowed "winners" to keep betting, which tells you everything you need to know. These businesses can only exist because they're allowed to skew the odds in their favour. Eliminate this unfair practice and the problem goes away on its own.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/feb/19/stake-factor...
Yeah, I've worked in the industry for a long time. I think good regulation would prevent per punter limits. I don't really see why doing this would make the industry unprofitable, the odds have a margin baked in, exactly the same as a 0 (and in the US the 00) in roulette. Worst case they would have to increase the margin, which maybe isn't so good for casual players but at least it's a level playing field.
I also find the common implementation of in-play delay poor. The way it generally works is a delay is applied before confirming the bet, anything which changes (including pricing) causes the bet to be rejected. The main reason for this is that the traders sometimes only have access to something like sky sports so their feed is quite far behind someone at the stadium. I feel like in reality it should be based on official timings.
They will just switch to a betting exchange model where the house gets a percentage of the turnover and the rest is distributed to the players. Under this model there is no incentive to ban winners.
It’s possible this is the future of the industry.
The big money maker in prediction markets is combos or parlays in traditional sports betting. The market for these types of bets is tiny so you need Wall Street firms like Susquehanna to come in and provide liquidity which is what they do for Kalshi.
What this means in practice is you don’t place a bet with fixed odds, it’s more like placing a market order on a stock.
If a Sportsbook could effectively give custom odds on each bet for each player based on the market it would essentially be what prediction markets do today.
The problem with this is liquidity, particularly well before an event. It's why the original exchange (or at least the first one I'm aware of) also now offer a normal sportsbook.
But the two big players in question do not do this, do they?
Gambling is extractive by definition, so I’m not particularly convinced that it’s not a problem for most of the people that “enjoy” it.
I have worked in gaming before so feel free to disregard my opinion but I truly do enjoy occasional betting and while its hard to argue it’s a net positive in my life it has never caused any financial hardship.
Betting $25 on a game hijacks something in my brain that treats it like a fun problem to solve. It gets me interested in teams that I’d otherwise have no interest in. I’ve been betting on sports since the days of offshore betting sites and I can’t say I’ve ever lost or gained more than a few hundred dollars a year.
I’m an adult and I enjoy being able to gamble on sports. It’s never been a problem for me and I suspect it never will be because of the way I do treat it, strictly something to be done for fun.
I grew up in a household where family members also went to casinos and bet on sports responsibly so it was drilled into my head that you can’t ever beat the house and you should never bet what you couldn’t afford to lose.
What business do you have telling me what I’m allowed to do with my own money for fun?
I'm someone who thinks corporations shouldn't be free to prey lawlessly on emotional weaknesses.
What business do you have telling everyone your personal experience justifies the horror others experience?
If you couldn't put down that $25, would you really not be able to find some other way to entertain yourself?
Making gambling illegal doesn’t make it just go away. My Grandfather used to bet on sports in 40s and 50s with a local bookie. The bookies even ran sweepstakes which resembled the modern day lotto which my great grandmother played every week.
People like to gamble we need it legalized with reasonable regulations.
What my big problem is that Wall St and the wider market seems to be trending to the least ethical companies (Kalshi, Polymarket, Bettr) are running unregulated gambling operations, providing 0 tax money to offset societal costs and are denying what they’re offering is gambling at all and even promising you can make money off it.
The fact that you and the industry try to call it "gaming" is still such a scummy thing. It's gambling. Call it what it is.
I mean, it depends. Gambling in moderation is fine, and it can be fun. Aside from concerns about supporting casinos/gambling companies (which I'll acknowledge are real), I don't see any difference between paying $200 to play blackjack for a couple of hours and paying $200 for some other form of entertainment (e.g. attending a live show).
Gambling isn't all the same, betting on horse races in person can be quite an enjoyable experience it's not nearly as accessible as online gambling.
> this company is full of people with absolutely no ethics whatsoever
I believe this applies to any company which sells an inherently harmful, predatory, and addictive product or service
I feel like a much larger fraction of the economy is predatory than is made out to be in these gambling discourses. Examples:
* FSA plans are designed to get you to gamble on how much medical expenses you will have; if you overestimate, you either lose the money or spend it on shit you otherwise wouldn't buy; if you underestimate, you pay taxes on stuff you shouldn't be paying taxes on. The healthy alternative would be: Cut the FSA, let people just tax deduct medical expenses at tax time, even small ones.
* Extended warranty plans are baiting you to pay for something you are statistically unlikely to need. The healthy alternative would be: Just service things past warranty and charge a much more reasoanable price for it.
* Insurances but co-insurances, deductibles, clauses: "We'll bait you into paying because you think we'll pay but we'll not actually pay because it says in the fine print"
* Trip protection: Asking you to gamble on the probability of a mishap, instead of just covering mishaps out of the box
In theory, insurance is the polar opposite of gambling. It's supposed to be reducing your risk, while gambling increases it. Like "do you want to gamble on that TV lasting, or do you want to buy the extended warranty?" But in practice, the pricing is so terrible that it's not worth it.
Clearly, the solution is gambling insurance!
> The healthy alternative would be: Cut the FSA, let people just tax deduct medical expenses at tax time, even small ones.
That's an interesting rabbit hole. Some FSA types, but not all, have full funds available on day 1 of the year. And no provision for clawback if you terminate your employment before the end of the year. So when you forfeit due to overestimating the total, it does not go to the IRS, but your company. But the upside is the funds being available on day 1, with you having to wait until the next tax filing rolls around.
> no provision for clawback
Unless you're planning on quitting jobs mid year every year I wouldn't really call that an advantage. On all other years you either end up buying piles of shit you don't need just to not lose your FSA dollars you gambled that you would use but didn't, or end up underestimating your medical bills. It's such a broken system that one even has to make guesses like this. There is no need to make people guess.
> funds being available on day 1
Most people with FSAs have higher disposable income so this isn't really an advantage either. Lower income folks typically have HSAs instead.
Yes. Gambling goes a long way. I just recommended Natasha Dow Schüll and Addiction by Design.
That leads us to BJ Fogg's Persuasive Design Lab at Stanford and the addictive software design.
Tobacco industry owners figured out their time's out and bought food stock and put their addiction department to design food to be addictive.
Where should we head next?
Obviously “AI”
Please elaborate?
It was a low quality comment but what is the most addictive technology right now? So addictive that even some of my (older) family members basically let it run their entire lives?
Yes, you're correct. And it powers also all of the ones I mentioned. Thanks for the clarification.
Revolution.
Hope you're including all the state governments and their lotteries in this assessment.
The incentives driving state lotteries are not nearly as strong as those driving private companies like Draft Kings but yeah not great either.
Used to work at 7-Eleven and we would have people come in and out for hours on end pouring money into scratch tickets.
State lotteries are just a regressive tax targeting the poor.
> State lotteries are just a regressive tax targeting the poor.
As bad as the odds are, the lottery is still the best chance most players will ever have to be millionaires
To be a millionaire, maybe, but a $300/month scrather habit over 20 years, in a 401k that's just the SP 500 gets you a quarter million dollars, which isn't nothing to retire on, vs approximately $0 from scratchers.
Dude no offense but you must be vastly overestimating how many people can save $300 a month. We're talking about people buying couple lottery tickets a month.
> We're talking about people buying couple lottery tickets a month
Those people do not have a gambling problem, though. They are dropping a few bucks a month to buy a daydream. It could be worse, they could be spending 10x that on Starbucks.
That's the problem though. I know many people who can't save $300/month, but easily spend that much in consumables, scratchers, alcohol, drugs, etc. On the subject of gambling addiction, $300/month by someone who can't afford it absolutely happens. Go to a GA meeting sometime. They get their paycheck, gamble it away, and then don't have money for rent. Unrestricted gambling is the devil and will be the downfall of America. I'm not one for "shoulds", but there should be something like an accredited gambler law, where you're not allowed to gamble more than 1/3rd your paycheck except in certain circumstances.
> there should be something like an accredited gambler law, where you're not allowed to gamble more than 1/3rd your paycheck except in certain circumstances.
What would that look like? Would gamblers have to send copies of their pay stubs or bank statements to every casino or gas station they visit and every gambling app they use? I'd be happy if we focused on restricting the most harmful actions of the companies who profit from the people they turned into addicts. No more online sports betting. No more adverting for gambling. No more targeting children with gambling in video games that accept real money for anything. No more using AI or surveillance to detect and target addicts.
Payday loan places usually look at paystubs before extending a loan, so all I'm suggesting is places where you can gamble have to implement the same technology. The restrictions you mention seem harder to pass under a banner of "but muh freedom".
So we're in agreement. Those people didn't have $300 to save on anything to begin with, they just spent it anyway at the expense of other needs.
At least those often fund things like state education so, over time, the pool of victims is maybe lessened by the success of the program? Maybe?
(I am not defending state lotteries, but I do think there's some distinction to be made between "we actively exploit people to maximize our profits for our own sakes" and "we regulate the passive exploitation of people to supplement taxes in a regressive manner." Or something. I dunno, maybe somebody has more elaborate thoughts on this to share.)
In many places where gambling is banned, there is still gambling. And in places where it's legalized, it can (in theory) be effectively regulated (if there's political will, which is difficult to muster sometimes). And say what you will about lotteries, but it's far easier to blow your life savings at casinos and with sports betting than buying a bunch of lottery tickets.
Permit lotteries. Ban lottery advertising. A moral government shouldn't advertise products known to be harmful to the public.
Can we just ban all advertising except for word of mouth (but including fake word of mouth)?
I'd be happy to stop billboards, other large public displays and those shitty coro-plast ones that jerks put next to the slip road telling me they pay cash for houses or have some magical mosquito treatment. Start there and work our way up?
yes you can enjoy the free speech you want and other people can't tell us more great one
Individual humans get free speech, not corporations.
I get to yell "fire" in a crowded theater?
Sports betting apps are so “gamified” now that many people don’t stand a chance. They’ve made a bleeding edge addiction platform
See nature preserves that are funded by regulated big game hunting of the preserved nature.
It's a fun moral question. At what point do you give up trying to make someone/a population healthier and say "well if you're going to be this way, we might as well get some use out of you"?
And the legal option makes it less likely that organized crime will jump in to offer the service.
(To me, it seems) The same people who screamed to legalize weed a few years ago are vehemently against alcohol and gambling.
"we regulate the passive exploitation of people to supplement taxes in a regressive manner."
I was convinced by this for a full 30 seconds before I realized there are millions of advertisements for the state lotteries. They aren't just regulating a market that will exist with or without the state, they are actively promoting and encouraging it
Can only speak for Pennsylvania, where I live, but before the lottery there were numbers games run by organized crime. At least with a state-run lottery they're a bit more honest about how you're getting screwed and they can tax the winnings.
> At least those often fund things like state education so, over time, the pool of victims is maybe lessened by the success of the program? Maybe?
You have some numbers to check.
(“Elaborate thoughts” aren’t needed here - are more people spending less on the lottery? where does each state spend the money?)
I've got plenty of negative things to say about state government lotteries, but the ones I'm familiar with are structured in less predatory ways. It's hard to spend thousands of dollars on lottery tickets, and impossible to do so in a way that won't feel obviously stupid, especially since you can't buy them on your phone.
You can buy them on your phone in some states, e.g. Georgia. Their "scratch offs" look just like slot machines and give the same lovely dopamine spikes; used to drop $100 in every couple months when I just needed happy brain chemicals.
especially since you can't buy them on your phone
Yet
Meta, ByteDance, ...
The problem is, some humans seem to be consistently drawn towards products or services that fit that description.
In the 1980s, if you wanted to gamble in my city, you went to a gambling den operated by the Civella crime family. If you got caught in a police raid, your life was ruined. If you got behind on your debts, the mob might take it out of you, literally. These were known risks, but people did it anyways.
Then, in the 1990s, there was a change in the casino gaming laws. Casinos opened with harm reduction measures in place. You can absolutely destroy your finances for life in one, but there are ways out.
These apps need regulation like in-person gambling has. Whatever they currently have, it's not enough.
It isn't inherently addictive. Gambling addiction is significantly less common than alcohol addiction, and has no properties that make it inherently addictive to someone who is not predisposed towards that addiction (unlike drugs, for example, which are inherently addictive to all humans).
Some slot machines/casino games are designed to appeal to problem gamblers. DK and co, however, do not design these games, and state regulators do already control aspects of their design. For online operators, this doesn't represent most of their revenue and, I suspect, most would be quite happy not to provide these products.
I've seen this "it only affects problem gamblers" thing so much that I suspect it's an intentional strategy to shift blame that takes advantage of people's natural tendency to believe the just world fallacy (bad things only happen to bad people).
Nobody's life is ruined by gambling unless they've made a bunch of irresponsible decisions. Bad things certainly happen to good people, but problem-gambling is self inflicted.
Gambling is absolutely inherently addictive as it's essentially perfectly paired with your brains reward system and hijacks it. There's literally dopamine cycle and tolerance happening. And when compounded by algorithms and notifications which are designed to amplify this even further I'm not sure how you can think it's not inherently addictive.
> unlike drugs, for example, which are inherently addictive to all humans
Define "drugs". Alcohol is a drug. Most users aren't addicts. So is tobacco. Most users are addicts. Cannabis? More like alcohol than tobacco in terms of addictiveness.
There may be some selection bias. Smoking tobacco is an unpleasant sensation. There's no reason to do it other than the addiction and the effects on your brain chemistry afterwards. Whereas many alcoholic drinks taste great in their own right and would be consumed even if they had no chemical effects.
I suspect gambling is like alcohol or cannabis. Engaging in it affects brain chemistry. For some people that's addictive. Most people are able to enjoy the activity without being hooked.
>Smoking tobacco is an unpleasant sensation.
I disagree but maybe I’m just addicted.
I stopped smoking 15-20 years back and still remember it fondly. It is definitely a pleasant, if smelly, experience.
There’s no “maybe” about it.
As a former smoker (I started and quit twice), I strongly disagree that "Smoking tobacco is an unpleasant sensation."
It's terrible for your health, it's "burning money", it literally makes you stink, it makes you winded walking up stairs, and is generally terrible.
But the little head rush you get starting the day with a coffee and a cigarette feels great.
> But the little head rush you get starting the day with a coffee and a cigarette feels great.
That's the effect on brain chemistry I referred to.
Do you actually enjoy the smoke in your mouth, burning your eyes and lungs?
A cold beer on a hot day is refreshing just for its temperature alone. A fruity cocktail tastes good because sugar tastes good. What's enjoyable about the physical sensations produced by smoke?
I mean maybe we're arguing semantics, because the pleasure of eating sugar is possibly also an alteration of brain chemistry. But there is a difference.
As a former smoker (quit in 2009), I absolutely LOVED smoking. The whole thing. Opening the pack, packing it down, pulling out the cigarette, lighting it, the first drag filling my lungs, the fullness in my chest. The only thing I didn't like was that it made me smell bad. When I started a job where I was working close to people and the smell made me insecure, I decided to quit. I still miss the ritual.
Anyone who has quit smoking will tell you that the habit is the hardest part about quitting, not the physical addiction.
Most people don't actually like the taste of alcoholic drinks when they first try them as a teenager.
The reason you like the taste of beer is in large part because your brain has learned to associate that taste with good things happening (the alcohol feeling).
Same with coffee, it's bitter, objectively should taste bad, but you learn to like it.
It's the same process
> The reason you like the taste of beer is in large part because your brain has learned to associate that taste with good things happening (the alcohol feeling).
Explain the popularity of non-alcoholic beer.
> Same with coffee, it's bitter, objectively should taste bad
Many fruits, vegetables, and foods (cheeses, unsweetened chocolate) are naturally bitter and widely enjoyed, even though they don't give you a high.
People also enjoy bitter caffeine-free herbal teas.
> Most people don't actually like the taste of alcoholic drinks when they first try them as a teenager.
Many children don't like vegetables either. Adults more often do. Our tastes change as we grow older.
> Do you actually enjoy the smoke in your mouth, burning your eyes and lungs?
Many years ago when I smoked - yup, sure did. I loved the entire experience, except maybe going outside in the middle of winter.
> Do you actually enjoy the smoke in your mouth, burning your eyes and lungs?
TBH I just didn't have those sensations. People wouldn't get hooked if it felt terrible.
My sister still smokes, and every now and then I'll have a few hits of one of hers, and it's great. No doubt I could get hooked again if I wasn't careful.
The silver lining is there's a whole boatload of drugs I never tried (and never will) because I know first hand how easy it is to get addicted.
The real number we want evaluate is "what percent of the revenue comes from people experiencing significant negative consequences from the product."
For alcohol that number is something like 2/3 revenue from the top 10% of drinkers, who drink an order of magnitude more than the decile below them. I doubt gambling is very different but if you have more info I'm happy to hear it.
Gambling is proven to be addictive in the same way many other things are, and the harm of severe addiction is comparable to that of the worst drugs. It's very common for severe gambling addicts to lose everything they have, to lose everything they love, to never psychologically recover, to kill themselves.
Movie ref -- "Leaving Las Vegas"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaving_Las_Vegas
Addictions spontaneously can turn on. For me, it was age 27. To classify people as inherently susceptible vs not is not accurate
IMHO one shouldn't expect a company to have any ethics to achieve a positive outcome for society. This needs to be baked into the rules (taxes, regulation, ...), so the ethical behavior becomes the rational behavior.
I think we should be able to expect a company to have ethics, just like we should be able to expect them to follow the laws, but we should also regulate them to ensure that they do and punish them meaningfully when they fail to.
> we should also regulate them to ensure that they do and punish them meaningfully when they fail to
Fully agree, that's what I mean.
You can't have rules in a society, that are against the moral feeling of sizable chunk of the population. That's just going to be a source for conflict. At some point you do need a population with a moral compass or you get nowhere as a ruler, especially in participatory ruling systems like a democracy.
So, you want government to decide what is good and bad behavior?
I think it's not a matter of want. The goverment makes the rules, and the rules decide the emergent behavior of people, in companies and elsewhere. Whether their emergent behavior is good or bad, whatever that means, is a result of the way that your particular country selects the goverment. Mine is probably different than your's.
That is not the purpose of laws
I do want the government to protect people from predatory and exploitative behavior.
We do this with laws already
companies are a fiction made out of people, they don't have anything, and regardless what the rules are I expect those people to behave ethically at any given time.
I'm not entirely sure when people started to have this idea that when they walk through a company door, as if this is some magical portal into the realm of amorality, give up their human responsibilities and faculties
> I expect those people to behave ethically at any given time.
A company is set up and incentivised to maximize a profit function, and that in turn incentivises to promote people which are not impeded by ethical considerations. The hierarchy furthermore ensures that people which would otherwise act ethical, don't, for fear of losing their job. This structure behaves ethical as long as you put ethics in the profit function.
Again, who is setting it up, who is "the hierarchy", who "puts ethics into a profit function". This is weasel language to not talk about the ethical responsibility of individual human beings.
These firms don't spawn into existence, they don't choose their own functions and if the people in charge don't think ethically why should anyone else? Ethics is not a game of musical chairs. The people in charge of that company can choose, right now, to orient it towards a direction that's ethical, if that's not possible they can choose to close it down or leave. That's up to any person at any point.
There's nobody to do ethics for you, there is no ethics fairy to magically imbue your company with ethics, and if you hope the politicians or "the law" does it but you can't, why do you think the politicians are going to be any better, they all have the same financial incentives. It is you or nobody else.
"I'm not entirely sure when people started to have this idea that when they walk through a company door, as if this is some magical portal into the realm of amorality, give up their human responsibilities and faculties"
how can you became this naive ???? this is literally a company that get profit when you a lose
for their ethics, its inline with company mission
This is not a naive take. He doesn't say there can't be bad people/companies, he says the ethics of a company are the ethics of their constituents.
they are making a moral decision but a selfish one. If I take this job I can eat and support my family, if I don't I need to hope that I find another one.
Very few actually want to work for corporations that are unethical and prey on people and their weaknesses, but a large portion of the population does.
It started with Milton Friedman and the idea that The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits -- full stop, nothing else.
That frees one to think in a different way. No longer constrained by the convention of the common good, some folks, for instance, watched the movie "Wall Street", and took it not as the warning it so clearly was, but rather as in instruction manual. The wider populace believes this nonsense because it was passed on to us via Television, the Great Glowing Box of Truth that for the big chunk of the 20th century was the arbiter of reality.
Now we have people so confused by this bullshit and so in need of viewing themselves as "temporary poor" that they vote against their own interests on a regular basis.
Fortunately, the changing climate will wipe us out. :)
Would love to be a fly on the wall in whatever board room in the world has somebody saying “yes, we could increase profits by doing X, but that would be unethical so of course we won’t”
This happens at every gambling company in regulated markets like the US or Europe.
For comparison, there are offline casinos who use targeted adverts saying that they do not comply with regulators, and their adverts are designed in such a way as to appeal to people with gambling addiction (usually showing some kind of live play, which is banned in every regulated market afaik).
You can be sceptical of the motives of individuals but there are very strong corporate incentives from state regulators (in the US, particularly those with physical casinos).
> This happens at every gambling company in regulated markets like the US or Europe.
No something clearly different happens in regulated markets. There's a massive difference between "This would make us more money, but we won't do that because it's unethical" and "I wish we could get away with doing this unethical thing to make more money, but sadly current regulations make this one unprofitable for now. Lets increase our lobbying spend to try to fix that."
What usually happens is they talk about statistics rather than demographics. Eg “when doing x we’ve seen a 5% rise in engagement but a 50% rise in spend from those engaged”
Nobody is actually blind to the reality of the stats but this kind approach makes it both easier to dehumanise their actions as well as giving them plausible deniability when asked if they target specific demographics such as addicts.
I don’t think anyone ethical really goes into gambling business. I know engineers who left their high paying job in these “gaming” businesses to work for software companies because they see how many lives are destroyed and they are part of that system
The best thing would be to ban these sites. But barring that, they should be required to have auditing involving secret accounts that display this behavior and see how the app responds. It is crazy that they are allowed to send notifications to users that have set limits and use other techniques to encourage them to transfer more money.
> The best thing would be to ban these sites.
I think we could legislate some easy-to-understand, easy-to-enforce rules. Like, "you can't have more than N bets open at a time." (1?) Or, "you can't have more than $1,000 worth of bets open at a time."
True, addicts could skirt these rules by having different bets on different sites. But at least it would add a little friction, and it would be easy to monitor compliance.
I worked for the "gaming" (as they call themselves) industry.
They seem to have not gotten the memo that they're a legitimate business now.
Meaning that, should they get the memo, they’d change their behaviour to that of a legitimate business? Not being combative here, just not sure I follow what you’re saying.
I was being sarcastic how despite being a legitimate business on the surface, their practices are anything but.
Makes me sick that all of the major-league sports are in bed with companies like Draft Kings, completely ignoring the fact that the next Pete Rose-style scandal — or worse — is absolutely going to happen any time now.
The libertarian in me says people should be allowed to make their own choices but I can't negate that gambling in poor is overall significantly negative for society. Before India banned this kind of gambling, I had a firend who worked as a data scientist for Dream11, an online fatasy cricket like gambling app. He was able to see a lot about the people playing. Oftentimes, the daily 'ticket size' was somewhere around 100-300INR (about $1-3), these were folks earning maybe 1.5 to twice that at the most. Their kids were often going hungry so their parents could play.
>The libertarian in me says people should be allowed to make their own choices
This is a real question/comment, not a snarky one. When a libertarian says "people should be allowed", it seems to me to only mean "individuals". Because when "people", through their government, "make their own choices" collectively, this seems to be where libertarians get worked up.
Hopefully something comes of it. When ProPublica blew open the rent-fixing scam, officials laser-focused on one company that was doing what the entire industry was doing, dragged out prosecution, and then settled for peanuts, with the people whose lives were thrown into upheaval by criminal rent increases *ahem* not seeing a dime. What should have been a major scandal, what should have rocked the housing market, was instead brushed under the rug. And, of course it was, because it would have rocked the housing market.
I'm just saying, don't get your hopes up.
Beautiful and depressing read
Are people with ethics going to seek out jobs in the gambling industry, especially mobile addictionware gambling?
I'd work in weapons before I'd work in this. At least those are usually used against military targets and overall hurt or kill fewer people. A rocket might blow up one school, but this will destroy millions of families.
> this company is full of people with absolutely no ethics whatsoever.
I have bad news for you about venture capital firms, one of which owns the website we’re posting on
fork found in kitchen
I mean what do we expect ???? "the house" is playing fair ????
we literally have mobile game that have "gacha" which is full blown gamble and we pretend that the actual "online casino" is to play moral, ethics or fairness ??
we literally past that point ages ago
Not just mobile games. Roblox is basically an online child casino, powered by child laborers being compensated in Robux scrip. Fortnite isn't much better. We'd do a lot of good by regulating these games better too. The gambling addicts who got hooked with these games will move on to DraftKings when they're older. DraftKings knows this is their pipeline and has been investing in esports and video games like Call of Duty and establishing partnerships with Riot Games and Activision Blizzard.
“Let the passed be past” is ironically sage.
You and the people who downvote me literally miss an entire point
What is your point? Bad thing happened in the past, we should continue to let bad thing happen?
Most people find current system of gambling from phone to be too much. Forcing people to physical location and limiting advertising can be good harm reduction without causing increase in crime.
never ever I wrote that somewhere that "we must let them"
how can you so dumb ????
You didn’t notice none of the other comments here look or sound like this?
well you can literally just see the replies of mine
my point is, we literally have a bigger problem than some "online casino" doing online casino shit
this is happening on game, apps, web etc
at what point people realize that this is just the way it is and don't take action like forever ?????
there is literally countless story how people get messed up financially on internet and that is only scratch of surface
That's your opinion, mine is different.
Yes, loot boxes and other types of casino games throughout the economy are a problem. Online Sports Betting has taken a small problem and caused it to be a big one so it's much more visible in public eye.
If we regulate sports betting, we should probably regulate loot boxes in FIFA 27 as well.
Society (i.e us) is to blame. We made this stuff legal. There was no need whatsoever. We don't get to blame the people working at these companies.
I think the blame falls much more squarely on powerful individuals like Adam Silver[1] and the companies that lobbied for this[2] than on society as a whole.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/opinion/nba-commissioner-...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/business/sports-betting-l...
Everything starts out permitted. Making things illegal requires action, and enforcing laws requires the application of nonconsensual violence - a direct action.
This goes back to the trolley problem. I'm part of society, and I'm not to blame in any way for this; I had nothing to do with it.
Read a little on the history of gambling in the US. It was illegal in almost all the US until recently, and could have been contained.
If you are in the US, you are to blame for the US gambling situation. We make the rules as a society.
"presenting signs"...there is no way for DK to tell that someone is addicted, which is the same error of logic in the original article.
There are multiple companies that will take your money and data and say they have found a way of identifying gamblers, afaik none of these products actually or can work.
What that article showed is: someone uses a product, they do not activate any features to use the product safely, and then they it is unsafe. DK have safety features integrated with governments already in the product.
If there's no way to distinguish, why was the author "made a VIP"? Or does that happen to every gambler
Again, the same mistake.
Yes, it happens to every gambler who spends a lot of money. That is how VIP tiers are defined, based on how much you spend. There is no way for them (or anyone) to understand the customer's state of mind. Should it be illegal for retailers to offer customers discounts? Compulsive shopping is significantly more common than gambling addiction, do retailers target those customers?
If you never want to gamble, you tell the state regulator you never want to gamble and you will be unable to use any site.
>There is no way for them (or anyone) to understand the customer's state of mind.
Maybe not their state of mind but if you have access to people's betting history you can very likely identify people who are "problem gamblers", especially if you also ask them their annual income when they become a customer (I have no idea whether they do this in the US, but they do on UK sites and will suspend your account if your betting exceeds certain thresholds).
You certainly wouldn't even AI to spot people who are chasing their losses for example.
As to whether they should be obliged to care, I'm not sure. But through public policy you can make it their problem.
You get made a VIP if you lose a lot of money, not if you have a gambling problem. In fact being made a VIP is basically the only way that the company can identify problem gamblers besides self-reports (because its the only time people from the company actually talk directly to the user).
I would be genuinely surprised if they weren't.
My data science graduate program had a class that analyzed major data science success stories. The very first one covered how Caesar's Entertainment built models and ran experiments to identify their "most valuable customers", figure out how to predict when they were getting ready to leave the casino, and intervene with incentives and perks designed to get them to stay and keep gambling. And also how all of their competitors rushed to implement their own programs in response.
Look at it from the casino's perspective: their entire business model is centered on exploiting quirks of human psychology to separate people from their money. Expecting prosocial behavior from them is like expecting a squirrel to ignore your bird feeders.
The EFF isn't saying it's a surprise that companies are doing this. Nobody's surprised by that. They're drawing attention to it and saying they shouldn't be allowed to.
I just don’t understand why casino’s feel the need to do that. They already have the edge, they would still turn a profit.
Same goes for banning advantage players. Why? The people that can successfully do it are a vanishingly small group, and even if every single one of them picks your casino because it doesn’t ban advantage players, the sheer amount of incompetent advantage players that would try alongside those would make it so you still turn a profit.
It's only the most cutthroat people who end up being in the position to make the decisions. So they end up making the decisions that come naturally to them
Isn’t this similar to all ads for useless stuff.
We’re being targeted to buy $100k cars we don’t need. Not much worse than being targeted to gamble an extra $10k.
At least with a car you know exactly what you're getting, you might not value it but many people out there are absolutely getting their money's worth back from a 100k car, be it ego or aesthetics or whatever, a gambling addict is just getting exploited and abused, there's no positive to it.
Is there any upside to vices in general?
Outside of vice taxes being a socially acceptable way to tax the poor.
I like how you have to be an accredited investor to get involved with riskier investment instruments but you can be a total moron with no money and lose whatever you have left betting on sports and prediction markets.
Btw it’s not just those two, add iGaming into the mix which is cell phone gambling glammed up in Candy Crush form. Leeches, all of them.
I believe there are "casino games" on Apple and Android stores that are similar to actual gambling, you just buy "tokens" that can never be redeemed for cash.
Proof if proof needed of the complete pointlessness of casino gambling. Some people will still do it even when they know they can't win anything.
Have you ever heard of gacha? This is the entire shtick as I understand it
Yep, check out PlayTika's slew of games for an example. They're a pretty large company specializing in this kind of stuff.
To be fair, those "investor knowledge" checks are self-reported knowledge.
Some brokerages are more strict, but plenty just let you check boxes.
"In the United States, to be considered an accredited investor, a natural person must have a net worth of at least $1,000,000, excluding the value of one's primary residence, or have income at least $200,000 each year for the last two years (or $300,000 combined income if married) and have the expectation to make the same amount this year, or must otherwise be a holder of a specific license in good standing."
Of course you can still lie but legally there is a line.
The accredited investor standard is higher then a basic test.
The standard may be higher, but the implementation is "This is what it means to be accredited: are you accredited? By the way if you say no, I can't sell you the thing I've been trying to convince you to buy."
If you had to take and pass a test, that might filter out more people; although I'm sure the seller would help you pass the test, so maybe not.
Is there really no enforcement? That seems, uh, bad?
GP didn't say test. They said "self-reported knowledge [about yourself]". Which is correct.
the accredited investor standard is, a checkbox
its purpose is simple. if you lose the money of sufficiently powerful people, as a middleman, the standard exposes you one more kind of legal jeopardy.
Somebody said (I think it was FrostPrime) roughly: Gambling is genuinely the scariest drug, I actually think it's worse than cocaine and it's just right there on your phone.
I think that really framed the issue well to me. Imagine having an addiction problem and having to carry the problem substance around with you 24/7.
> Gambling is genuinely the scariest drug
Every personality has something, it seems, that it tends to get addicted to if given the chance. Gambling has never been that to me. I get bored with most of the games and upset at losing money—even if I net win, I’m irritated about the incremental losses.
On the other hand, I have to manually keep track of how many days in a month I drink because if I don’t I’ll happily have half a bottle of wine every evening, and I think I know where that leads. (When I lose money in a casino I almost always translate that into a nice dinner. Which I will, invariably, enjoy far more than winning imaginary numbers.)
> and upset at losing money—even if I net win, I’m irritated about the incremental losses.
While you don't appear to be susceptible, it is notable that this mindset is not something that makes you less likely to develop a gambling problem. It's actually part of how they drive addiction. A customer who is annoyed at every loss is often a customer who will chase their losses with more/bigger bets, trying to get the winning high back.
> customer who is annoyed at every loss is often a customer who will chase their losses with more/bigger bets
That makes sense. When I lose a bit the boredom accelerates and I just want to leave. I’ve “spent” the money on an experience and it was boring.
The only exception to this is card games. But I don’t like those at casinos or on my phone. And I’d be happier playing a board game with most of the folks I play poker with.
The fact that you think you incrementally lose but are a net winner indicates to me you're illinformed.
As someone with years of experience in this industry, only a fraction of a percent of gamblers actually meet this defination. But they all think they're net winners and write off losses as "incremental"
The other one on that list is food (or, using food to cope with trauma, resulting in an addiction).
You have to eat to survive, but when it becomes your only source of peace or happiness and/or you get addicted to it … very bad things happen and it’s very hard to moderate.
Imagine having a gambling addiction and trying to watch sports! I swear every third commercial is for gambling.
I don't think there is nearly enough attention on the pipeline that has been created for children to grow into good little gamblers. All major sports games have absolute borderline gambling within their game in the form of those fantasy style Card games. Pair that with watching any live broadcast of a major sport and the gross ads for all these major sports better companies, with the ad reads during the game.
Haven't followed all that closely for some other games, but it very much seems like the model for NBA2k is to release a new game with some minor patches each year, charge 70$, then spend the majority of that year crafting patches for the card game to keep whales interested in constantly spending on new packs(which are promptly devalued on the next release, and straight up killing the prior year's game's online service, makes them entirely worthless the next year).
It’s really disturbing to me because sports are one category of entertainment that is supposed to be family friendly and accessible to kids. They look up to pro athletes as heroes and all the gambling ads are directly being shown to children. It shouldn’t be legal to advertise age restricted products and services to kids, even if they’re not the “intended” target. They’re still being groomed to accept gambling as cool and normal. Gambling, alcohol, all those ads should be subject to the same safe harbor restrictions as sexual content. Ban the ads from stadiums and jerseys too.
I don't watch sports much, but the last times I did they filled the screen with ads for gambling in the middle of the games while they were being played
beyond that, every sports podcast actively encourages gambling. hosts lightheartedly joke about their bad beats like its a pratfall. while entertaining as a non-gambling outsider, i think its a colloquial rationalization of life-ruining behavior
and also blasted into your face at any opportune moment (TV, billboards, print media, in person conversations)
When a gambling addict spends money on a bet, they're actually spending that money on a moment of hope. After the bet is placed but before the cards fall, they can live in a place where there is at least a possibility that they can make enough money to escape their problems. That moment of possibility is experienced as hope, and it's a feeling that's truly addictive to the hopeless.
It's scary like all addiction, but particularly sad at its core.
i've always wondered at the intimate relation between risk, dopamine, anticipation, and utility. I'm not an expert and only going by amateur armchair observation, but i suspect that evolution has spent a lot of attention on the problem of non-guaranteed rewards, and the phenomenon of gambling addiction is merely a reflection of that, just like how that of adhd is a reflection of ancient humans needing to be overly alert for subtle signs of danger (or something like that, not an expert)
That "live in a place with possibility" surely triggers the anticipation part of dopamine (which is what it really is, more so than the pleasure part). Dopamine is also intimately connected to movement: i.e. the shakes for people with neurological conditions as well as addicts going through withdrawal or about to relapse.
“Gambling company leans into its target demographic”
I worked with a state lottery that did similar things. Their target demographic was the “every day players” that would compulsively buy at the gas station.
I quit that job because it seems to be morally wrong.
Betting apps are just this taken to the extreme, I feel for people with this addiction but it’s not going away anytime soon.
I worked with a state lottery as well. They had very clear training for the retailers they worked with to identify and stop problem gambling. There was space reserved in ever ad and on every retailer counter for stop gambling assistance. The few meetings I attended all began with what they had done to reduce problem gambling.
So I'm guessing this varies state by state.
It's hard for me to view that as anything other than mostly for show.
The retailers still have every incentive to sell as many lottery tickets as people will buy, because that's how they make a sizable portion of their money.
And the gambling addiction hotlines are too little too late. I've known people who struggled with gambling. They never admitted they had a problem until they had bottomed out. At that point I doubt the lotteries and casinos particularly care because that well's already run dry, anyway.
If the gaming industry really wanted to put their money where their mouth is on this one, they'd figure out ways to prevent people from getting into that situation in the first place. Putting limits on how much money anyone person can lose, even if only at a single establishment, is one idea that wouldn't even be hard to implement. But of course we won't see that because, unlike gambling addiction hotlines, that runs the risk of reducing their profits.
I worked with a heroin distributor as well. They had very clear training for the dealers they worked with to identify and stop problem heroin use. There was space reserved in every text and on every dealer’s coffee table for stop heroin assistance.
Not equating your work for a lottery with dealing heroin, I’m just pointing out that to say you don’t want people addicted to heroin while still selling heroin isn’t sufficient, and I think the same applies to lotteries. If they acknowledge the problem stop even offering it as a product.
The difference is that the regulator controls your licence to operate. So if you do something that fails to meet the guidelines they create for responsible gaming then they take away your licence.
Acknowledging the problem doesn't make it go away: you must be a big war on drugs guy? right?
Fair point, and I’ll concede that regulation is an attractive concept here. But in the gambling case specifically it seems that regulation has resulted in an explosion in gambling. The hotlines and responsible gaming stuff appears totally ineffectual and geared more towards the operators being able to say “we care and are doing something” when what they’re actually doing is using AI to prey on people. At least with drug decriminalization or legalization there are genuine attempts at harm reduction.
Imagine having a "stop gambling assistance" section of your fking AD to promote gambling to people
> Betting apps are just this taken to the extreme, I feel for people with this addiction but it’s not going away anytime soon.
Why? This wasn't a thing that existed 10-15 years ago, this isn't some long-standing institution. We could ban online betting apps today if we wanted to.
When widespread sports gambling was illegal before, there were not rich and powerful people whose ability to maintain and grow their wealth and power was tied to keeping sports gambling legal.
Now those rich and powerful people exist, and they will use their wealth and power to keep it legal. It is not easy to put the genie back into the bottle.
Sports gambling definitely existed 10-15 years ago. And it's hard to ban things on the internet with cryptocurrency being a thing.
It's pretty wild that we let it be advertised and boggles my mind that pro leagues jumped on the train.
Before cryptocurrency there was Liberty Reserve, anyway.
> I worked with a state lottery that did similar things. Their target demographic was the “every day players”
That's wild. Wasn't the whole point of having a state lottery to put the state in a better position to be able to discourage people from becoming addicted? The very idea of a "target demographic" seems contrary to that goal; the "target" should be to have nobody buying tickets.
One of the arguments was to make gambling legal, less harmful, and regulated to protect players from cheating. In my state the state lottery company puts out TV ads. Stores have scratch off vending machines with strobe lights on top. So much for harm reduction and making gambling something that you have to actively seek out.
> “Gambling company leans into its target demographic”
This was my takeaway as well. Is anyone surprised at this outcome?
Ban state lotteries while we're banning DraftKings IMO. I find I cannot have a productive conversation with anyone who thinks the odds of winning the lottery are higher than winning in the stock market buying total market funds.
Ah... Got it... The same galaxy brains that think p(foom) has a materially greater value than an epsilon minimally >0 to avoid divide by zero errors believe in lottery tickets. Got it. Explains a lot, thanks...
"poor tax" framed by the state to help fund things education.
It would be fairer if the state returned the money to taxpayers and funded education out of the general fund.
And yet somehow education still doesn't seem to have enough funding, despite the lotteries raking in cash.
Education has plenty of funding. Per pupil K-12 spending has grown relentlessly higher than inflation for decades.
And somehow academic performance rarely improves and at a guess that's because raw spending is the wrong metric...
https://www.americanexperiment.org/study-finds-weak-relation...
Well, aren't they though, technically?
Your $1 lottery coupon has extremely low chances of winning a million dollars, but they aren't zero. No one will sell you any stocks for $1, but even if they did what is a chance of a random $1 stock increasing in value one million times?
> No one will sell you any stocks for $1,
You have been able to buy mutual funds in dollar increments for like forever, with the significant caveat that there's often a minimum purchase amount, but once you hold that you can add in single dollars if you want +/- they only deal in a certain number of decimals.
Fractional share trading of stocks and ETFs happens at a lot of brokers for the past several years, too. Do they really want you to buy $1 of BRK.A? probably not, but you probably can.
Also, there's like penny stocks. :P
But yeah, there's no mechanism for that $1 to turn into millions of dollars within a few days. It can happen with a very well timed purchase, many decades, and some inflation, but that's not very exciting.
ETFs have sold for $1 for quite a while.
Expected return on a total market fund is 9 to 10% annually. Expected return on a lottery ticket is 30 to 50 cents on the dollar.
Just like AI p(Doom) in the next decade is approximately zero, but we all have to pretend to it's between 1 and 10% so American frontier labs can implement regulatory capture.
So if what you're saying is you are willing to bet $1 if I give you a 1 in 1 billion chance of winning $1M, I will take that bet. And I will take that bet as many times as you'd like.
But your best chance of winning $1M? Start with $10M.
The expected return on lottery is -30-50%.
So 30 to 50 cents on the dollar then like I said?
I dont think the post you are replying to was saying gambling on lotteries is rational. They are just saying the best possible outcome of buying a lottery ticket is much, much higher than buying an index fund (and the average, median, and worst outcomes are much worse)
Man, who would be so stupid to get addicted to gambling?
Oooh, Claude is giving me a free spi... reset until October 22? Maybe I will stay on their Max plan. My tokens aren't getting me as far as previously, maybe I should buy another plan? Man, I just got this one new startup idea, I know this will be the one where investors will love me. I can feel it. C'mon Opus, just one more session... come ooon...
I enjoyed your comparison but it is not valid.
You are really comparing programming with Claude Code to gambling additions?
It's valid. Extremely similar addiction mechanics.
Chronic losers, says the article. Not whales. That's unexpected. I'd thought that those big gambling sites were parimutuel, where the counterparty is other bettors and the site just takes a cut. Horse racing tracks and prediction markets work that way. The house can't lose, and doesn't care who wins. The odds keep changing as bets come in and the odds rebalance.
Apparently that's not true for sports betting. A 2024 study out of Connecticut found that 1.8% of problem gamblers in the state accounted for 51% of sports betting revenue.[1]
[1] https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/DMHAS/Publications/2023-CT-FIN...
I frequently get DraftKings ad on YouTube featuring Kevin Hart and Nick Jonas, they're pushing the information that it is now legal in every state.
I also get loads Polymarket and Kalshi ads. Polymarket seems to have invested tons into featuring mega celebs like LeBron in one of their ads. Other ads feature influencers showing off how to trade and such. More obnoxious part is that these companies pay influencers to talk about trading and winning live on streams- without disclosing they're paying those influencers.
Polymarket even set up fake website where influencers showed they were winning hundreds of thousands of dollars. You wouldn't find those bets on the real Polymarket website.
We do seem to be in a “everything is allowed” era
> We do seem to be in a “everything is allowed” era
Except when it comes to protesting certain things.
It's an era where destroying genuine intrinsically valuable things is the highest reward activity. Until we run out of things to convert to money, that is.
Except online poker (here in the states)! Gotta keep that one prohibited. Now, betting on every freethrow Joe BBall takes in a game ... we're morally good there. It's those pesky immoral cards we have a problem with!
After all, a deck of cards is The Devil's Picture Book[0][1].
0. https://beaconlights.org/sermons/a-deck-of-cards
1. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68367
Individual liberty is a dangerous thing, by design.
Existence isn't safe, and it's not up to the state to try to make it safe for you. It's our responsibility as a society to ensure that you have maximum liberty, insofar as it does not directly harm other people.
You are entirely free (or, should be) to harm yourself, or to make decisions that put yourself in danger.
Elections have consequences
They actually don't. That's the problem.
https://prospect.org/2026/07/07/economic-hit-men-for-gamblin...
The meaning of that is, the people you elect matter. If you keep voting for the same (kind of) people, you will get the same results.
Some betting company made a partnership with my area's public bus system to put their ads on the side of the bus. There is no recourse for this, it seems, and this explosion of gambling ads is only going to get worse.
Couldn't we make an argument that Meta is using AI to behaviorally target chronic lazy thinkers?
On a serious note: no idea why we legalized nation wide (maybe it's just certain states) gambling on Sports. Money talks. We know this.
I lived in Boston during the early hey day of DraftKings in 2015 when it was just a game, and they spent something like 250M of series C money on marketing [1]. The entire city was pretty much "littered" with ads. Everywhere you looked. I interviewed there as it was one of the hottest startups in the city. But for some reason, I knew it was a front-door into sports betting and I was pretty off-put by the whole thing. Didn't know it would go as far as it did, though. (Also, I didn't want to write C#.)
A toast to all of you who've left career money on the table because you have some minimal form of ethics and morality.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/7/26/11615054/another-unicorn-is-bo...
Calling online casinos “prediction markets” doesn't mean they get a moral exemption.
Using AI to attract people with gambling addictions and those most likely to lose money is rotten.
I hope our industry develops an immune response that creates real friction to those building and funding these things.
> DraftKings is using AI to behaviorally target chronic gamblers
Wow, this actually sounds like an amazing idea!
> According to the New York Times, DraftKings is using its customers’ betting records to train a machine learning model to find losing gamblers. Once found, DraftKings sends these customers targeted advertising designed to lure them back to the site to place more bets—bets that DraftKings thinks will be losing ones. DraftKings has a business incentive to keep losing gamblers coming back to their site, because these are the users actually making DraftKings money.
God damn it.
I worked in gaming for a long time. I'm sorry to break it to you, but this is the entire gaming industry(not just gambling). And it has been that at least since the early 2010s when I got involved and all the way until I got away from it.
Legalizing sports betting and online gambling was such a massive mistake. They are sleazy immoral industries that profit on suffering.
One thing not mentioned here, is how this also affects those not gambling. People act as if the only problem is how it exploits gambling addicts.
But it fundamentally changes sports. Both the amount of money in them, which comes with their own problems (see ManCity's judgement today). But also how players are affected. I know a soccer player in lower divisions getting death threats because someone in another country was gambling on their match. People try to bribe what's basically amateurs etc.
I suspect most of the fraud by volume is going to be committed in the lower leagues in most nations just do to more access to individuals and less scrutiny.
The problem is any fraud at all, and the fact that it’s so incredibly easy to do it now, degrades trust and the sense of fair play. It’s now much more believable to question refs making bad calls against one team or another because of a profit incentive.
I'm not sure legalized betting makes fraud itself that much easier, but I'd agree that the incentives could now be larger in the US if tied in with legal betting. Those markets dwarf the illegal markets that drove a lot of famous instances of fraud prior to legalization. More fans are probably suspicious of calls now but, I mean, sports fans don't generally need much of a push to find a reason for suspicion of officials.
I follow baseball and multiple members of the team I watch have had articles written about death threats they get. For instance https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/giants/article/mlb-threat...
Not to mention the allegations of match fixing. As a massive college football (American) fan, every outcome that someone doesn't like is questioned on every forum as "the refs had a bet on it" or whatever.
Gambling addiction is a brutal public health problem. As I understand it, gambling addicts have a very high incidence of suicidal ideation. When people work in these industries, their paychecks are directly coming from putting people into deep suffering.
That's a matter of opinion. There are those of us that believe that it is a gross violation of one's human rights to dictate how they're allowed to spend the money that they earned.
It's a side effect of liberty that people can choose to put themselves into deep suffering. I know people who do the same by blowing all of their money on designer clothes or expensive cars. Nobody is talking about regulating poor people wasting money on those things.
If you earn the money, you're entitled to piss it away. Them's the breaks.
I don't think any part of the comment you're responding to is "a matter of opinion." You're choosing to insert your opinion that you don't think it's moral for a government to help addicts if they are charged for the thing they're addicted to.
You're welcome to that opinion, but don't pretend that "addiction is a public health issue, gambling addicts have high suicide rates, and many profit from others' addictions" are subjective.
Do you also support legalization of hard drugs? Why not have a heroin store in every town. The customers are very loyal. Let people waste their money on drugs, it's not my place to tell people what to spend their money on. Who knows, maybe we'll get heroin ads on the subway. In fact, let's let cigarette companies also advertise again! what could possibly go wrong?
i somewhat agree with you.
at the same time, it's really not cool for billions of dollars to be spent on research of how to best influence susceptible people (who would otherwise not piss it all away,) to piss all their money away.
ban the predatory advertising and maximally addictive interfaces and most people will be happy. you can still piss your money away if you want to. but it really shouldn't be one poor sap with an addiction vs. a trillion dollar industry trying to exploit that addiction.
Then the premise is does the suffering of others affect you
Intellectually honest answers only
Problem is when it effects others. Addicts often have families. There's also a social cost when they go broke and lose everything. Just like with drug addicts.
But this is more about the companies preying on addiction, incentivizing it.
> That's a matter of opinion. There are those of us that believe that it is a gross violation of one's human rights to dictate how they're allowed to spend the money that they earned.
Hi, we live in a society. People who bankrupt themselves out of whatever money they have earned and become a burden to the society at large via homelessness/welfare/crime. Which is also the same case for hard drugs (traditionally this was originally a problem with opiates). I personally do not care if you decide you want to kill yourself with heroin, but I do care as soon as our taxes are used to deal with you as a side-effect.
So making reasonable laws that curtail some of the worst things you can piss your money away on to curb crime/homelessness/welfare/er-bill-delenquency expenditures seems like a wise decision.
Libertarian thinking tries to ignore these side effects but they are real.
>I personally do not care if you decide you want to kill yourself with heroin, but I do care as soon as our taxes are used to deal with you as a side-effect.
isn't this already the case with a lot of things that carry less negative stigma? bankrupcty, limited liability, extreme sports (base jumping, rock climbing, etc), financial risk taking, health choices, bailouts are more socially accepted, but they also risk pushing costs onto the public upon failure.
i mean if you base jump and your chute fails you end up as a smear at the bottom of a cliff somewhere. They will probably attempt an air rescue and some poor park ranger will have to come out with some buckets of water and wash whats left of you off their monument. However as someone who knows someone who had to be airlifted out of a national park, he survived and paid for that helicopter ride and his medical bills (gust of wind blew him off an exposed high trail and down into a very steep ravine where he broke a leg).
A heroin/fent/meth addict doesn't die right away, and usually doesn't die until after years of crime/homelessness/welfare. They cost every day until they finally overdose, now with narcan (if they are on an opiate) they can be saved from that overdose (and hopefully rehabilitated) but often that doesn't even stop them.
We have to draw lines somewhere and sports betting, in my opinion is somewhere a line should be re-drawn.
Legalizing targeted advertising was a massive mistake too.
Advertising needs to be more targeted if anything. I don't want to see a bunch of irrelevant junk - I want to see high quality products that are useful to my life.
"I like being manipulated so I think everyone should be manipulated" is certainly A Take in 2026.
Is your idea that manipulative advertising actually works based on anything? Trying to make people want something they don't already want is a massive waste of money.
Yes, based on it being one of the largest most profitable industries in the world. There is an immense amount of data showing that shoveling ad money into a product will convince some percent of people to buy it. Or just glance at the ads that fill up most people's Facebook feed and Google SERPs; it's mostly crap that looks flashy but few seconds but that few if any people actually have a real need for.
I've personally blocked who knows how many tens of thousands of ads online over the past couple decades. Somehow I doubt my life is lacking for not buying hundreds of extra products I would have learned about from all those targeted ads.
I'm talking about manipulative advertising. Showing someone a product that they're interested in and then go on to buy isn't manipulative.
Let's work off of dictionary.com's definition of manipulation:
>to manage or influence skillfully, especially in an unfair manner.
I think we can agree that advertisers influence skillfully, given that advertising firms don't typically pick their executives from a pool of unskilled labor. If I were taking your position, I would take issue with the qualifier "unfair" here. After all, what's unfair about showing a product that people are interested in? Isn't that what they want? To be shown things that are interesting? People don't often go to uninteresting movies, or sit through uninteresting lectures. Surely it saves everyone a lot of time to skip through the uninteresting products and get right to the ones that actually make sense for a person to buy.
This is where it gets interesting. Targeted ads a not simply "showing a person something they are interested in, because in order to show something to someone who is interested in it, we have to have a willful expression of that interest. When a person goes to a car dealership, they don't say "hey! It's unfair that you're showing me all these cars!" because, well, they expressed interest in cars by showing up at a car dealership and asking for a person to show them around.
Targeted ads do not take in willful signals. They take in surveillance data. They watch how a person moves and infer things about them; they assess when the right moment of low will power exists, to insert the ad at just the right moment of influence-ability. That is what is unfair about them, because it subverts the social contract around the purchase of goods and services. Instead of making one's product so good that the most number of people will buy it, they follow people around to find the time they are most vulnerable to what they're selling.
Yeah, and sometimes the things people want are addictive and ruin their lives.
In that case you don't want advertising, you want better product discovery. Advertising is fundamentally incompatible with usefulness because it's based on how much cash someone can fork over. A company can make the best product in a market segment, but if they don't have the money to advertise it, they will lose to the hot garbage offered by their competitors. The only recourse is people organically recommending the product to one another - so the most useful venue is not even advertising. Letting companies pay for your attention is actively hostile to you, because there is no guarantee they're presenting you with the best option, just THEIR option.
I'll repeat an idea I had a while ago, but if countries just had national networks where companies could list their products and services in a way that is highly structured and as systematically scrubbed of bias or psychological manipulation as possible, we would get the best of both worlds. Effortless and non-favoring lookup of what you want, fair comparisons between products, no favoritism to the wealthy, no FOMO or mind tricks.
> because it's based on how much cash someone can fork over
I'd argue here that a business's marketing budget is going to be effectively unlimited if it's profitable, assuming they have the initial budget to kickstart it which most do. If $10 in ad spend returns $12, you can just keep pouring money into it.
Apart from that yeah you're right that the goal is better product discovery.
The previous reality for sports betting was mostly illicit, often with some goon using physical violence or threat thereof for collections. This is not to say the new reality is an improvement.
Should have at least nationalized it like lottery is in many countries to maintain some control.
In general, there is a bigger philosophical question.
Do we treat humans as
1) having full agency, and thus full responsibility for their actions
2) having less than full agency, and then to what extent must society/governments implement control over things that humans can't control within themselves
Because generally, if you subscribe to 1, there is nothing immortal from taking money from a human that that wants to hand it over, provided that human well knows what is at stake. So as long as these websites aren't defrauding the customers with fake stats, there really is nothing wrong.
If you subscribe to 2, then thats a much riskier line to walk because that affects a lot of things, not just gambling.
> So as long as these websites aren't defrauding the customers with fake stats, there really is nothing wrong.
This is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.
We clearly subscribe to option 2 in the United States. We don't allow access to medication based on your own volition. We don't allow access to medical procedures based on your own volition.
Option 2 is world wide. Unfortunately it seems to be the correct one if we want society to last. I don't think that humans have the internal machinery in their brains compatible with growing a society without strong oversight.
This framing is nonsense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
You frame as if agency exists, then exploitive coercion doesn't exist.
We can respect the agency of folks to smoke or drink, while also criminalizing lying to entire populations about the known health effects of your products.
We can respect people as having agency, while also acknowledging that psy-ops like those run by Cambridge Analytica, or even normal psy-ops like mass market advertising, can influence groups of people through deceptive or manipulative ways in aggregate and cause massive harms.
We can respect personal agency while also acknowledging some folks have addiction problems, addictions problems be intentionally manufactured by products and platforms. There is a balance between allowing a poker game, and allowing the MGM Grand to plant a limo driver in a recovering addict's driveway.
We can respect agency while acknowledging those with large reach because of wealth can cause mass harm through media, influence and coercion if unregulated.
We can grant authorities to police and politicians without Qualified Immunity from consequences of their actions.
You are mixing 3 separate issues into 1.
1. If someone knows all the information, but still chooses to make the wrong decision.
2. Someone is being told wrong or incomplete information, leading them to make the wrong decision
3. Someone is being forced by external means into making an wrong decision.
Two and three are already illegal, under fraud and coersion.
Im solely talking about 1. Because if you don't believe people have full agency in that regard, you have to prove to what extent can you determine what is deception. You can't just willy nilly say that something feels immoral, and therefore should be banned.
You appear to be making the assertion that any economic exchange taken by two adults with full information is morally acceptable. Is that correct?
If so, would you accept the following as moral actions?
Financial adviser charging substantially above-market fees to recent widows, who lack experience in finance (All information is available, but not understood)
Selling heroin outside of a drug rehab clinic (All information available & understood, but under compromising circumstances)
>Financial adviser charging substantially above-market fees to recent widows, who lack experience in finance
As long as the financial advisers statement is along the lines of "this is the service I provide, these are my rates", with no lies about saying how his rates are the best or lying about what he can actually do, absolutely no problem.
That doesn't mean that he is of a moral upstanding character, but he certainly shouldn't be banned from setting his own price.
>Selling heroin outside of a drug rehab clinic (All information available & understood, but under compromising circumstances)
This one is tricky, because unlike online sports gambling, this ties into other things.
My answer would still be yes with the following caveats
* The heroin seller is FDA certified and not making the drug at home where he can accidentally mess it up and kill someone that is not expecting to die.
* We have a system of dealing with people effectively who turn to drugs. Id be 100% for state/government funded drug camps where anyone can either voluntarily enter, or get put there if their drug use causes them to be a public nuisance. They can stay there, get shelter and food and basic first aid for free, and get all the drugs they want, with 2 caveats: no advanced medical care (if you OD, or have a heart attack, you die), and the only way to leave is to go through a trial reintegration program where you get support for getting off drugs, get put to work, and do this for a year before being let out.
Well I agree that 2 and 3 are settled matters, but 1 is simply hiding an unexamined definition of what choice is.
So, what does it mean to choose something with full agency?
It means that you assume that the person is capable of rationally analyzing a situation, and making the best choice for themselves. And if that choice is financial ruin, than that is what they want, and if doesn't affect anyone else, they should be able to make that choice.
It is possible to believe that people have full agency and allow them to make wrong decisions, but in the case of wrong decisions about harmful addictive things where such people tend to later themselves wish they had not gone down that path also believe that we should not allow others to help them make that wrong decision.
What about fallible, gullible, with full agency?
Then it means that people are responsible to themselves to fix their gullible nature
Every man and woman and child for themselves! Cooperation and support are for weaklings.
More seriously, it seems like you have an uncommon view about good ways for people to relate to each other. You may recall that humans evolved to live in large, cooperative groups :)
There is a difference between allowing free agency while creating an environment to steer people away from bad things, versus banning said things.
The term nature to me implies that it can't be fixed, because that IS their nature.
But people aren't responsible for taking advantage of gullible natures?
Do you know what an addiction is?
Are humans not in control of what they get addicted to? Or are we genetically born with a switch that gives us no option to get addicted to stuff?
> Are humans not in control of what they get addicted to?
When you see an attractive woman, do you have a choice about whether you think she's attractive?
I would say that is so instinctual as to not be a choice, even though different people have different opinions about who is attractive. And yet we know that men in particular go to great lengths to be with attractive women, some to the point where it becomes an obsession.
What about food? Do you not like things that have a bit of fat, sugar, and maybe some crunch to it? There are clearly people who, despite having all the necessary information, will eat too much, to the point where they become ill from it. How is that a choice?
Every decision that we make, at every moment in our lives, is exactly how an LLM chooses the next token to output - at the end of our thought chain, there is allways one that wins with the highest probability.
Its highlighted well in the psychological effect of tossing a coin when you are not sure about something, not to make the choice for you, but to see how you feel about the outcome, which tells you what you really want.
So for someone that overeats, and then feels ill, knowing that would happen, is simply a case of them valuing the enjoyment of food over feeling ill. If they were perfectly logical, without emotions, they would overeat, feel ill, and then not complain about feeling ill because they understood that they did it to themselves and this is a necessary sacrifice for the enjoyment of prior. But because humans are emotional we react to feeling ill with negative emotion, which externally makes it seem like we made the wrong choice, but we didnt.
Pure nonsense. A mind is not a sequential automaton.
You're treating the state as "we". It certainly claims to be "us", but that claim is - for most world states - partially, or entirely, invalid.
Also, on a semi-related note - there is the legality of gambling, the legality of running a gambling operation, and the legality of doing so for pecuniary gain, and it is possible for just part of these three to be illegal.
Do you honestly trust these companies to not mislead their customers
In my lifetime I've witnessed America accept new revenue sources by relaxing the moral code. First, it was allowing businesses to be open on Sunday. Then it was allowing liquor sales on Sunday. Then it was liquor ads on television. Then it was very controlled, state-run gambling (the lottery). Then it was casino gambling. Now it's online gambling and 'prediction markets'. Then it was recreational marijuana use. And so on. My point of reference is Missouri, where I grew up, but I think most states have followed a pretty similar path, all in search of new sources of revenue. I predict this trend will continue all the way to prostitution. Yes, that sounds crazy, but if you would've told me in the early-80s that Missouri would have casinos and legal weed, I would've considered that crazy.
I think legalizing cannabis was more about not jailing people for consuming a plant.
It's hard to respect a legal system that jails someone who wasn't hurting anyone. Repealing a law that criminalizes victimless behavior, especially when so many people already break it, paradoxically increases respect for other laws. It reinforces that the law serves a purpose: protecting people and promoting the general welfare.
There is no such thing as a victimless crime. Smoking marijuana has many many victims. I have personally seen enough people that smoked themselves stupid or into poverty that it hard for me to see it as a victimless crime. The issue was always that that laws and punishments were too lax.
> I have personally seen enough people that smoked themselves stupid or into poverty
We mostly don't criminalize self-harm. Is it really better for those people to be in prison, with violent criminals, and have a record, than be stupid or poor from too much smoking? Who does that help?
Drunk people get into accidents and fights and even commit murder. Cannabis users mostly stay home and snack. And yet we don't lock up people for buying a six-pack.
They made the same argument for gambling. "It's a victimless crime!" Except it isn't.
Cannabis isn't as chemically addictive as gambling.
Gambling is a victimless crime, if the gambler is a single person with no dependents. Most of the harms are when someone gambles away the family home or their kids' college funds.
Gambling is worse than cannabis. There's no limit, other than your credit, to how much money you can lose gambling. That's not true for cannabis. You can only consume so much and even grow it for free if you need to.
I support legalizing gambling too. Making all gambling illegal drives it underground and allows criminals to profit from it.
But I equally strongly oppose online gambling or gambling advertising (while we're on the subject, I think alcohol advertising shouldn't exist either). You can't smoke or drink anywhere, anytime. Why should gambling be any different? Go to an IRL casino or betting shop or racetrack and gamble. Regulate the hours and locations of these establishments.
Gambling, alcohol, and cannabis aren't good for you. So why allow them to be marketed to people? If they want to gamble (or drink or smoke) they'll find out about it and do it. No need to deliberately try to get people to do it.
You know prositution is already legal in certain counties in Nevada, and it's been that way since '71?
The list is far longer than you've mentioned.
Here's a list of things you're allowed to profit on either as an investor or as a participant that are quite wild: Fighting with gloves (more lethal than bare-knuckle), bare-knuckle fights, kids in contact sports (even combat sports), throwing away perfectly good food in order to lower taxable income, not planting a crop specifically because it wouldn't make enough profit, gig-economy not paying living wages, a minimum wage below living wage, predatory lending, algorithmic social media that swings elections, targetted advertisement psyops, marketing to children, cosmetic surgery in general but especially for children, forced conversion 'therapy', experimental life saving treatments gate-kept by money, planned obsolescence, plastic packaging...
In combat sports, we're really not too far removed from the collisuem, just that it's "not meant to be to the death" even though it does often result in death or lifelong conditions. The fighters get paid, the organizers get paid, the arena gets paid, the advertisers get paid...All in the name of watching someone not quite kill someone.
Hell, we've even still got slavery tucked neatly away behind "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.", but we know that many sitting in prison are demonstrably innocent. The prison is allowed to require that every inmate works. You're allowed to run an organization that profits from these slaves. You are not legally required to pay in some states.
Sorry but Sunday blue laws are religious discrimination. It’s just a day and businesses shouldn’t be restricted by a single religious sect. Gambling and substance abuse are actual public health issues.
I once observed ill-conceived online campaign to combat high gas prices by organizing a one-day boycott from purchasing gas. The intent was to send a message to oil suppliers. The problem is that not buying gas on Monday means drivers will just buy more gas on Tuesday -- delaying consumption instead of reducing it.
Blue laws are similar; they delay but do not reduce consumption. However, they have a fantastic pro-social side effect in that they allow workers in affected businesses a day off.
To this end, I would love to see a mid sized municipality experiment with raising minimum wage 10x one day a week and see what kind of culture develops around that.
Capital constantly needs new frontiers to exploit, and therefore must remove moral and social obstacles that stand in its way. Pseudo-prostitution has already been made widespread via platforms like OnlyFans, it's only a matter of time before in-the-flesh prostitution follows, as you said.
It's curious to me that so many progressives or soi-disant leftists are in favor of dissolving these types of moral and social traditions while being fervently anti-capitalist. It seems that they (meaning the subset who are always looking for new fenceposts to tear down) are in fact the shock troops of Capital.
Are you several hundred years old?
The idea that putting substances into one's own body is somehow immoral is itself an inducement to the violation of the rights of others.
Your morals have nothing to do with what others do with their own body.
Not all of us view morality through the lens of monadic individualism.
> I predict this trend will continue all the way to prostitution
Probably. We don't call it prostitution anymore it's now called, "sex work."
Sex work includes things like working on cam-sites and phone lines, which are not prostitution.
We didn’t legalize it. These people are criminals.
At least where I live it is explicitly permitted as long as you get government authorization: https://igb.illinois.gov/sports-wagering/sports-authorized-o...
And this is the sort of use of AI that ought to be regulated. But it's not as exciting as an AI going foom and cleansing the planet of the scientifically illiterate so it doesn't get traction.
Why regulate the AI bit instead of the behavior itself? If you don’t want people to exploit addiction, then outlaw that, rather than saying you just can’t use AI to exploit addictions.
How do you frame that to rein in Meta and Google? That would be a good start.
You can just ban these gambling and marijuana companies that cause harm to people. This article does a good job of summarizing a few, but not all of the reasons https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/09/29/...
why are we lumping marijuana and gambling together?
Marijuana is not zero harm, but guess what: Making it illegal is ALSO not zero harm. The drug war is an abject failure, US consumers have driven Mexico into a failed state with roving gangs of narcos who murder crowds of people with impunity.
"Studies say..." OK. Actually study weed then. Actually do clinical trials and apply science and tell us the actual results. Actually doing that has been prevented because it is a scheduled drug federally. So all we have is folk wisdom and half-baked one-off studies. "Linked to" has no scientific value, it is a term the news uses to scare people.
I think people should be informed and be allowed to make their own choices, as opposed to creating a huge and tyrannical law enforcement agency that will ruin a kids life for carrying a plant around.
Always funny how conservatives are the party of freedom, unless it's something they don't like.
What do you expect? They thrive on addicts. No different than NYSE:META, and NYSE:RDDT, and NYSE:BUD and NYSE:TAP and NYSE:(fill in whatever proven-to-be-addicting product you want)
And I would add... There is a sophisticated ecosystem of profiling and psycho-managing potential addicts from before they've even signed up.
Affiliates, data brokers, dodgy media inventory, credit bureaus, specialised CRMs (known to be leading edge on segmentation and ROI prediction) etc. etc.
I used to work in adtech and someone in sales told me that DraftKings and FanDuel did not like being referred to as gambling companies. They always wanted to convince people that it wasn't gambling, even though it's so obvious that's what it is.
This is out of date. They didn’t like to be referred to as gambling companies when it was just daily fantasy sports. There was legitimate debate as to how much of daily fantasy sports was skill and that mattered to its legality in many states. There’s no debate over whether sportsbook betting is gambling.
> The more data a company has, the more personalized the ad can be.
Cue me looking pensively at my Apple Watch, happily collecting my biometrics for about a decade now.
I’ll look at cheap dumb watches and see how difficult it is to switch back.
On a related note: Brasil has just passed a bill to ban gambling platforms and “””influencers””” are crying left right and centre for losing their sweet sweet sponsor blood money. Music to the ears, almost.
Online dating apps do the same exact thing. When you try to disengage they spam you with notifications and emails saying a bunch of people want to talk to you.
You actually login or god forbid pay for a subscription, all of your matches are disabled bot accounts. I actually have a theory that daiting apps are responsible for a significant portion if not most of those bots.
I’m actually more willing to work on a gambling or prediction product vs a dating app.
At least everyone knows gambling is a scam.
Dating apps are a Cursed Problem: If they worked well, they’d be out of business. Therefore they must not work well.
Distill it down even further: everything online that promises any kind of reward is a scam.
Why only online?
Offline it takes a lot more effort.
It’s much harder for a 49 year old man to pretend to be 23 year old woman to try to get you to buy feet pics in real life vs online.
Because offline it's possible to punch a scammer in the face. There are still many offline scams, but not as many.
Why would you even need AI to target losing customers? It's easy enough to identify them without anything clever: just look at their PnL or EV.
This should come as no surprise to anybody. They have every incentive to exploit those who can't resist their offering. Gambling is the new tobacco industry.
> This should come as no surprise
We need a better way of responding to journalism evidencing what was previously suspected and accepted.
Hooray capitalism!
I knew I would reach the top of some list, not the top list I wanted to be at but damn the phone is ringing non stop from DraftKings.
DraftKings also owns JackPocket, in case you want to play your local state lotto without ever leaving the house.
They are about to get kicked out of Massachusetts due to this behavior. Love that for them.
Aside:
Michael Lewis has a good interview question for the 2025-2035 time range:
?: Do you have an account in good standing with any of the major sports betting apps
Goofus: Yes, I bet all the time. I have a $300 3-way parley for this weekend.
Gallant: No, I don't really gamble.
Galaxy: Sort of? Draftkings limits me to $5 bets now.
Let these companies sort out the smart and idiotic people for you.
They'll always do this. It's not even "AI" it's just a boring old ML model.
Money Stuff did a great bit on this a few days ago. There's 2 functions inside DraftKings:
- Fin the most lucrative customers, to keep engaging them.
- Finds addicted gamblers, to get them help to quit gambling.
These are the same people.
Sure, yeah, there's a nice little story about gambling within your means, blah blah. But if you're optimizing your gambling app, you're going to find and create problematic gambling as the core objective.
AI, ML, whatever. It's a gambling company. It targets gamblers. It probably shouldn't exist.
Michael Lewis did a similar series for one of the seasons of his podcast.
What amazed me was that Chris Christie (then governor of NJ) used state money to fund SIX consecutive lawsuits trying to get online gambling legalized in New Jersey.
meanwhile, free-to-play gaming's business model is to speedrun through the population via ads to find the most mentally unwell or underdeveloped people with access to credit cards or at least grandmothers who will buy them gift cards
I worked in a large and well known online casino as a technical account manager. I promise you, for all the "responsible gaming" stuff they have written everywhere, if a big account decides to stop playing (let's say they just want a break from gambling), their personal am will be arranging free trips and vip treatment to keep them on the tables. I have seen it happen and it disgusted me. I no longer work for such companies
If you are vetting a romantic partner or a business partner, I would strongly urge you to check their phone. If they have DraftKings or FanDuel installed... run. Some might even say they lose some but it's for entertainment. I'd still trust them less than a social heroin user.
You will find a lot of people who will tell you they win at these things. They don't. How do I know this? Because if you win consistently, they kick you off. You're bad for business because the pigeons need to win occasionally to keep playing (and losing).
Gambling (and I include Kalshi and Polymarket here) shouldn't be this accessible. Back when you had to go to a casino, it was still bad but that barrier prevented a lot of harm. Being able to gamble away your future and your family's future from the comfort of your phone simply shouldn't be allowed.
I know people who place bets fairly regularly (weekly during their favorite sports seasons) and they have been making profits yearly. You're not going to get banned for making hundreds of dollars in profit. I'm not saying these guys are making good decisions or should even keep doing it, but I have seen their activity statements.
you absolutely can get banned for making hundreds in profits! Has happened to several people I know (maybe the flag for them was having a v obvious pattern).
What I've learned in life is how much people lie. They may not intentionally lie. They may just be wrong.
As an example, if anybody tells you their commute to work is 25 minutes, it's more likely 45 minutes. "It takes me 10 minutes to get to X" really means 20. I don't know what it is but people just don't get this right.
It's way worse when it comes to money. "My income is $X" literally means "My income is 0.3X to 0.7X". I need to see employment contracts and W2s before I believe you what you say about your salary. People will even lie anonymously (eg on surveys). It's like they need to believe it themselves.
So when you say you have friends who net win hundreds of dollars, unless you've seen P&Ls, I don't believe them. And I'm sure these sites don't make it easy to figure out your total P&L because then you might stop. People will remember and boast about their wins and downplay or just plain forget their losses. They'll minimize losses and exaggerate wins. It's just human nature.
Ever notice how no gambler says they consistently lose? Everyone is somehow a winner? Isn't that sus?
>And I'm sure these sites don't make it easy to figure out your total P&L because then you might stop.
That's just not true. Fanduel for example shows your lifetime win/loss statement ("career stats") prominently on your account page, including your Net Total in a large number right on top that is impossible to miss or ignore.
Most people lose, because you are paying a vig, so you have to win ~60% of your bets just to break even, but that doesn't mean everyone loses - they certainly don't. This is evidenced by the fact that people who routinely win from the sportsbooks can and do get banned.
>You will find a lot of people who will tell you they win at these things. They don't. How do I know this? Because if you win consistently, they kick you off.
This is only true in some cases and entirely depends on your form of gambling. Draftkings and Fanduel both run "daily fantasy" and sportbooks, and they are quite different. If you win consistently enough on the sportsbook, then you are taking money from the house, and they will ban you. The "daily fantasy" gambling on the other hand, works on a paramutual basis where they take their profits off the top. For example they will take 20% of the total prize pool regardless of who ends up winning or losing. Much like the track when it comes to horse racing, they don't care who wins or loses because they are getting the same % either way, and the more volume there is the more money they make.
It's like "customer success", weaponized.
They did it before "AI" using machine learning.
Spend any time examining the behavior of gambling companies and this will be utterly unsurprising.
The way they operate their business is deeply immoral.
They know they sell an addictive product and take full advantage of that.
Well, it's just good business!
I wish gambling was outlawed entirely. Let bookies run it in some crack dens, I don't care about that, but every single gambling ad I see in the open is infuriating for me like no other ads. It's been seeping into sports commentary and even news on TV, "oh I don't think we have a full picture of the situation Kalshi has it at 60%", die in a fire. It's comparable to scammers preying on grandma.
No, I don't care about the "but liberty!" arguments.
Another perfect example of why we don't need new laws, we "simply" need to enforce them. Supposedly, Dark Patterns are illegal. If the corporation had to tell you how they use your data, would you let them?
DraftKings: Hi we're going to give you extra incentives! User: Hmm, sounds like I might like that. How do I get them? DraftKings: You have to lose constantly! And then when you start winning, we take them away! You like that, don't you? User: No.
Dark Pattern. No new rules needed. "Just" enforcement.
I agree this is a bad thing, but what's the legal definition of "dark pattern" that covers this behavior?
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/P214800%20Dark%...
"Coined in 2010 by user design specialist Harry Brignull, the term 'dark patterns' has been used to describe design practices that trick or manipulate users into making choices they would not otherwise have made and that may cause harm."
Not sure if this reference to a definition is the same thing as saying it's the legal definition, but this is at least in a document as /a/ definition on the Federal Trade Commission's website.
Are you asking me to see how this mechanism applies to this definition?
My question was more like this: There is some statutory basis for enforcement. If "dark patterns" is itself a basis for enforcement, there's some legal definition of it, and I'm curious to know how that's operationalized, since the definition given here doesn't seem precise enough to be legally actionable.
At the end of the FTC doc, there's this statement:
> Firms that nonetheless employ dark patterns, take notice: where these practices violate the FTC Act, ROSCA, the TSR, TILA, CAN-SPAM, COPPA, ECOA, or other statutes and regulations enforced by the FTC, we will continue to take action.
This implies that dark patterns themselves are not a cause for action and some other specific law or regulation needs to be violated in order for the FTC to act.
I'm going to assume you want to know how this is a dark pattern per the definition I found and put in the other response I gave: "design practices that trick or manipulate users into making choices they would not otherwise have made and that may cause harm."
Per the EFF link, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/draftkings-using-ai-su... : "Once found, DraftKings sends these customers targeted advertising designed to lure them back to the site to place more bets—bets that DraftKings thinks will be losing ones."
A good analogy might be asking if a restaurant has any "specials."
I've read that some unscrupulous restaurants will make the "special" whatever is not so fresh and they want to get rid of. And for some restaurants, that might mean something that is really starting to go rotten. Something no amount of sauce or spices will redeem it. In fact, just about anything else on the menu would be better.
But a scrupulous restaurant will make the "special" something that is really, well, special. A new recipe they just perfected and the ingredients are actually especially fresh and in season. And its because of these scrupulous restaurants that people still ask what the specials are.
A promo at a gambling site might actually be presented because they want you, the user, to have a good time. It could be ambivalent to whether you are doing good or bad at betting. These are "specials" that are actually special.
And, in fact, I think most people would prefer it was ambivalent. You almost certainly wouldn't like to know the site is happy in the fact that you lost money on your bets and now hopes you lose even more. Can you imagine if DraftKings said "Congratulations! You seem exactly like the kind of sucker and compulsive gambler that makes us the most money! Since you are losing so much money, we are giving you a promo on this bet that we think you are especially likely to lose money on! The more you lose the more we win! Please lose more by clicking here!" Since there is no such language, this is the rotten fish "special."
Similarly, social media's algorithms /could/ give make most prominent the posts that make you happiest and most contented. This would be "specials" that are special.
But we know they don't. They make prominent that which will make you angry and isolated and sad. They know this, and they don't put "PROMOTED: We think you'll hate this, and we want you to see it, because we think the more miserable you are, the more you'll use us!" This is the rotten fish "special."
It's all Dark Patterns. No new laws needed. "Just" enforcement.
We will soon look back at these companies like we did the pharma companies that created the opioid crisis in America.
And by that I mean almost no one in charge will be held responsible.
I would be surprised if this was not already systemic and endemic across the retail space preying on people who have compulsive spending, gambling issues.
Really this is the entire economy now, giant companies that have billions invested in mass surveillance and heavily min-maxed dark patterns targeting the wallet of the average unsuspecting consumer. Nonsense subscriptions that are impossible to cancel, replacing ownership with "license", customized pricing, endless advertising, zero customer service, shrinkwrap licenses that change daily, etc etc etc.
Of course it is. That's where they make their money. In other news, the local drug dealer is targeting drug addicts and the bar still serves the alcoholic who has destroyed his family and is drinking himself to death.
Back in my day this was called machine learning.
"You show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome"
Of course they are. They're also doing things like offering big sign up incentives with long play-through requirements (you know, the "200 in bonus bets when you deposit $5" thing) to try to get people to download it, gamble a bunch, and become addicts. Some people play it through, take the $20 thats left, and they're done. But some people start playing more regularly. Its all extraordinarily predatory and I'm pissed off every time I see a PrizePicks billboard on my commute. This stuff shouldn't even be legal.
AI - always associated with Evil. Yet people still think AI will fix everything ...
It's so incredibly sad that gambling is such a widespread industry, even supported on a state level. It's rather conclusively a tax on the poor. It preys on desperation and lack of statistical understanding. I'm immediately suspect of anyone that supports it.
Not sure if I'm not losing enough or not gambling enough money, but those bastards barely send me any promotions.
We need to see the kind of regulation of these apps and websites that you see with state gambling control boards. If you need to present ID to walk onto a casino floor, you should need one to log onto these services. Each time. You should be able to ban yourself at the device account level. The odds need to be regulated.
Physical casinos sell to their whales, they’re what keeps them in business. Digital casinos sell to their whales, they’re what keeps them in business.
Casinos are a for profit business. If we don’t want them pursuing the path of least resistance we need regulation and enforcement.
Prevously on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49765288
Ban this shit. Fuck anyone who works at these companies.
Expanding / legalized sports gambling in the US was a terrible mistake.
Passive income? I need massive income.
Anybody seen those billboards? It’s disgusting.
Ah, another boon of LLMs for mankind. Up there with the use of the 'Lavender' LLM to produce targets for the Israeli military to bomb in Gaza:
https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
Why wouldn't they? We have no consumer protections so this type of thing is happening everywhere all the time on every level of society.
People with personality disorders, depression, anxiety, etc. all algorithmically being plied for attention. It's disgusting and nobody is doing anything about it, which will eventually erode buy-in in the system until someone is willing to let it all go without an adversary even firing a shot.
I'm shocked. Shocked!
Then there's me, using my AI tools to build a Fantasy Football lineup tool. Did pretty good last week!
Cool, but you're not running people's finances at scale. It does not compare.