Is the US a dystopia?

Didn't this happen in 2021? Milo's article is from May 2021

i only went to Starbucks because my kids wanted “the pink drink” and they wouldn’t shut up about it

they serve pepto-bismol at starbucks?

Do you mean the unicorn drink? Are you sure those children aren’t changelings?

behold teh pink drink. sorry i mean Pink Drink Starbucks Refreshers®️ Beverage

https://i.imgur.com/g8uEHnb.png

Beverage-style drink.

beverage-adjacent colloidal refreshment (note: may not actually refresh)

I'm guessing this must have blown over since the letter was written in May 2021 and I can't find any recent news about it since.

I can definitely understand why customers might not have wanted to go inside in 2021, being the newness of the vaccines and the Alpha wave at the time

Iirc the actual resolution was asking Sbux to HIRE MORE WORKERS not nec to make the workers work faster/more.

Universities are partnering with sports betting companies to introduce students and fans to online gambling — and reaping millions of dollars in fees. https://t.co/DZ6WOCAfoe

— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 20, 2022

I've been waiting for the wave of families-ruined-by-gambling stories since legal sports betting exploded. Just seems a matter of time.

Honestly horrifying.

Chris Holdren, a top executive at Caesars Sportsbook, said in an interview that the email was sent to underage students by mistake. “We were very disappointed that it happened, and we asked our partners at L.S.U. athletics to identify and solve the system breakdown,” he said.

I hate this so much. They're positioning the marketing of gambling to underage students as the point at which it crosses the line, when really the whole thing is gross whether the students are underage or not.

Also, using DEI initiatives as a shield, gross

I'm not a prude about gambling, mostly I think it should be legal, but also we know from like millennia of experience that mostly what it does is separate poor people from their money. I don't know what the right level of regulation should be, but not having it advertised everywhere all the time seems like a start.

Our society and economy is designed to suck money upward gambling is more honest about it.

I think gambling should be legal in all 50 states but no apps, no online betting (aside from poker, I guess) and cash only. You should have to get your ass down to a bookie shop to place a parlay and not do it from your couch tied to a 24.99% credit card.

Love Calz' betting shop memories

It seems unsavory to me, but then so does prohibition (which, as we have seen, just pushes the behavior into back alleys). I have no idea how to square that circle.

As a gambler that has lost thousands at times doing stupid shit over the years, i do think it should be legal, but some of the scummy things books do to entice bettors should not be (promising bonuses that require a certain number of bets, so you can lose back any winnings quickly).

I kind of like Milo's idea as that does strip away some of the impulse betting (though hardcore gamblers would scream about it).

There's a post about sports betting which people may not have seen on the Albert Brooks thread:

In view of all the disgusting "we care that you play responsibly" betting ads that are part of every baseball broadcast now--and not even just ads; the gambling industry is now incorporated right into the broadcasts themselves--Lost in America is looking weirdly prescient: "The Desert Inn has heart!"

(My dad had a gambling problem, so this is a real sore spot for me. We complain about lots of things on ILB, but baseball getting into bed with the gambling industry is far and away the game's most serious problem now--which I know it shares with every other sport.)

― clemenza, Friday, November 18, 2022 8:45 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Don't worry, we have safeguards in place, gambling definitely won't corrupt sports this time.

I hate how the NFL's partnership with DraftKings has sportscasters actually giving predictions on random things like over/under on how many yards specific players will have to drum up betting

There's an intriguing nexus between what Neanderthal mentions and hypersaberstatimetricization of baseball specifically and sports generally.

When I used to care about sporting events, I always used to giggle at broadcasters' weirdly specific stats. "Well, Bob, Gonzalez is oh for six when pitching on humid Mondays against bearded batters with at least one Scandinavian grandparent."

If that vast dataset has morphed in its use case from winning games to betting, it's a sad kind of Frankensteinian story.

A friend of mine works for a company that is now partnered with an online betting app, and during the FAQ presentation, he says management stressed that they should never refer to it as a gambling or betting. Instead, management gave some convoluted answer on how it was simply fantasy sports that turns game predictions into a game of its own. Heavy shades of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TLo4Z_LWu4

I once interviewed for one of those places that would send people out into downtown with a bunch of discounted Disney products and try to sell them to people at local businesses (to be fair, I had no idea what this place was before I interviewed) and I found it really strange that they would never use the words "sell" or "buy" and if you did they'd correct you to say "drop off" and "pick up" instead. it was weird and felt a bit like a cult.

fwiw I do enjoy sports betting but there's something uncouth about seeing it promoted during the broadcasts. it's like your parents telling you that you can have the Miller Lite in the fridge when you're 17. just feels weird

I just think colleges and universities seriously should not be in the business of taking a cut of their students' gambling losses. That is wild.

sports entertainment

To be fair, lots of colleges and universities already receive scholarship funds that come from state lotteries. So they’ve been in the business for a while. I agree it does seem grimier when it’s actual betting on student athletes.

I went to college during the online poker boom which introduced a lot of poor students to internet gambling and it definitely took a toll on some people and set them up to be lifelong degens

not me though, I was actually good at it :)

half the billboards I see along freeways in desolate parts of michigan are for weed stores and gambling which on paper I have no issue with but does feel sadly dystopian

It might depend on the details I guess, but isn't there a difference between "lottery-funded scholarships for students" and "colleges taking a cut of their students' gambling losses" ?

This bump has been interesting though. I suppose I'm not morally opposed to gambling in the abstract, but the gambling industry is indefensible (as are state lotteries tbrr)

The heart wants what it wants.

I mean, I am an Old, and I would love to tell you that back in the day, I was watching Masterpiece Theatre and reading Proust all the time.

But that would be false, because I was mostly watching Love Boat and eating Lucky Charms.

so you voted yes?

They’re magically delicious, iirc.

cultural appropriation though

Lucky Charms is Anti-Irish racism of the worst kind

maybe this makes me a prim do-gooder but i am opposed to gambling in both the abstract and the concrete. i think the ruin it causes in people’s lives outweighs any positives. i grew up around methodists who were so anti-gambling they wouldn’t even play go fish with a regular deck of cards though so i am probably an outlier!

aside from my deep lack of interest in gambling, i think keeping it away from sport was one of the few mitigating factors in favor of any athletics scholarships at colleges.

burn all that shit down

Honestly, that is how I feel too Tracer, but in writing that post I realized I don't have a cogent moral argument against gambling at the micro level of like two friends betting each other $10 or w/e. Ultimately, I think I have a deep discomfort with people getting ripped off (i.e., paying money and receiving nothing), even if they claim to enjoy it. It is interesting that gambling seems to have nearly completely lost its immoral aura.

Lotteries should def be illegal too, I don't get that. Someone once very condescendingly described them to me as "a tax on people who don't understand probability," which is obvs gross but speaks to why I don't think governments, who also manage public education, should be running them.

I don’t have a strong stance against gambling; it seems like throwing money away, but I see the argument that just because some portion of the population struggles with it, doesn’t mean it showed be banned (i.e., what folks would way about alcohol, etc.) I do look askance at this marriage of apps and gambling, though, because it seems to designed to make it feel less like gambling and more like a consequence-free video game. Even if one isn’t a gambling addict, it makes it far easier to casually waste money then having to go to a casino or the track. And all these apps are gamified to encourage people to engage. It just seems like one more way society is encouraging large corporations (with an assist from the state, as illustrated by the articles in the New York Times today) to harvest money from people. Which isn’t great ever, but particularly during inflation.

while i agree with the sentiment that gambling is immoral, i'm not the type to go around trying to argue about that which i find moral or immoral. i try to argue in the "more or less damaging and to whom" area.

aligning huge amounts of industry and capital to gambling seems far worse than somebody's casual side-betting.

i've never focused much thought on lottery. i'm just not informed on ppl going broke or staying broke because lottery tix. "aligning gov't with immorality" seems to have so many much bigger targets, i don't focus on that either, maybe i should then.

i heard a decent piece somewhere on how gig-work like doordash and uber are gamified to their "contractors," and the overtones of gambling made super real were so depressing.

Not sure if you're responding to me specifically, but "aligning gov't with immorality" is not really my objection; it's aggressively marketing what amounts to a regressive taxation scheme as a delightful game that could improve your life forever. I might think differently about it if there was zero advertising or marketing for them.

point worth making rob, thx. yeah i think i was carelessly misinterpreting your post but it was all pretty free associative ilxing by me.

There's also the bread-and-circuses aspect of it — give the people gambling and weed and it'll keep them too distracted and poor to effectively organize against growing authoritarianism. (We've all seen The Running Man, right?) But like the left-libertarian I am, I favor regulation over prohibition. Definitely not comfortable with the mass scaling of it we're seeing now.

gambling to me is a lot like alcohol or casual sex, similar primordial appeal imo, sometimes it's worth doing something stupid and base to make yourself feel more alive. opposed to it being illegal, think it should probably be more tightly regulated. just glad i wasn't given the gambling "card" in my "hand" of addictive behaviors tbrr.

on the subject of gambling generally i would defer to gamblers who do it in moderation

I heard a woman interviewed on the radio once about her experience with gambling addiction, it was pretty revelatory to me because I don't think I'd ever thought too seriously about it. She took responsibility for her actions, which destroyed her marriage and bankrupted her, but also was clear-eyed about the predatory nature of the casinos she frequented, how they made it so easy for her to escalate from a casual tourist to a regular to a dopamine-chasing addict who was always sure the next win would make things OK.

(And no it was not Marge Simpson.)