Is the US a dystopia?

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.)

as a recovering gambling addict (video poker) I do think it should be legal, fwiw, along w/drugs etc

comedy is tragedy plus animation xp

xp lol no problem Hunt3r, this is not meant to be a serious thread tbrr

tipsy's post reminded me that part of my objection stems from reading a big chunk of this book: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160887/addiction-by-design

https://www.propublica.org/article/911-call-analysis-jessica-logan-evidence

Maybe more for the police abuse thread but every new fad in cop mind-reading magic feels a little bleaker.

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.

This is also why it’s absurd how much of the safeguarding is written off assigned to the companies themselves. The friend I mentioned was grimly amused when the presenter told her that customers could request a block for a certain amount of time, so they could bet responsibly if they felt it was getting out of hand—this information came after 20 minutes of slides about how app notifications, "double earning periods" and other gamified features were being implemented to "increase engagement". What company is truly going to be interested in preventing their customers from giving them more money?

my view of this is skewed since I've made a decent amount of money playing poker, in fact online poker was what got me through college. but yeah there is such a predatory nature to this stuff. I have a friend who's got a real problem and the local casino keeps finding ways to lure him back. $75 in free play! 80% off a hotel room! Free meals! You can leave any time you want! They know what's going on. god, I remember my first trip to Vegas, I was playing craps all night, and realized it was morning only when the cashier opened up to a line of people rushing to cash in their paychecks, after which I was hit with a rush of profound sadness, though it was blunted somewhat by the 13 Michelob Ultras I had drank. I'm cool with legalization, in fact I think it's real bullshit that all this is going on and online poker is still not really legal in the USA, but advertising it is definitely not a good thing

I think sports gambling is inoffensive to the extent that it consists of people betting against each other with honest (lol) brokers in the middle balancing the sides of the equation and taking a percentage. But I've got no doubt that the sports books are learning every psychological lesson from slot machines to get people just mashing a button over and over again and still have it count as "sports betting". Like those slot machines that have the smokescreen of "technically, you're laying pari-mutuel bets on historical horse races!"

also the advertising of sports gambling on sports broadcasts/teams is such a hilarious conflict of interest that it would actually be shocking if it somehow became illegal in America because there's clearly too much money in it

but the US is not a dystopia I get my coffee beans in the mail every two weeks

lol being on the winning side of the dystopia doesn't make it not a dystopia!

It's hilarious to have grown up watching baseball when the entire MLB freaked out about Pete Rose, but here we are when major league teams are literally building sports books right into the stadiums!

the usa is a dyspepsia it’s too much coffee what does that xp

I think sports gambling is inoffensive to the extent that it consists of people betting against each other with honest (lol) brokers in the middle balancing the sides of the equation and taking a percentage. But I've got no doubt that the sports books are learning every psychological lesson from slot machines to get people just mashing a button over and over again and still have it count as "sports betting". Like those slot machines that have the smokescreen of "technically, you're laying pari-mutuel bets on historical horse races!"

― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Monday, November 21, 2022 12:04 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

dunno if this is true or not but I remember there being a rumor that Monday Night Football was lobbied for heavily by Vegas as it would provide a way for the big losers of the week to "get all their money back" in one shot. there's also the prevalence of "live betting" which I think is designed to hit those same buttons however I think it's one of those things that's too clunky to really work

Casinos are intentionally disorienting and hard to leave.

Lots of ATMs and no clocks.

And it's difficult to find the exits.

Especially when you're drunk on free (bad) booze.

I've only had two casino experiences, one in Atlantic City and one in Reno. I thought both were equal parts fascinating, entertaining, and depressing.

I've been to one in Indiana and one outside Seattle. The latter was fine, played cheap slots for an hour and actually won enough to pay for a decent dinner. Indiana was for a bachelor party and was one of the most depressing experiences I can remember.