Agreed -- I will continue to shout it from every perch I can: politicians who are actively working to proliferate these apps should be (at least journalistically) investigated. I would bet on this being a well-above-random signal of either a personal gambling addiction or corruption.
Word document metadata shows the bill's proposed text was written in circulated in a .docx file created by a lobbying firm that's paid $90k/month by the Malaysian owner of a local casino.
Not bad for 30 seconds dedicated to a first blind attempt!
That would be totalitarian and goes against how open societies work. So not banned, but constrained to sensible limits. Speculative investment markets should also be limited because they are also non-value-add activities.
could they regulate it in some manner? I like betting on sports but to the tune of $50/month or so, it just makes any event way more interesting when you have $20 on the line.
Maybe just put a limit on how much you can transfer to the app each month or something? Like $500?
So is alcohol - there are plenty of people who gamble responsibly and get enjoyment out of it. Taking away the entire thing rather than simply making sensible regulation and dealing with scumbag behavior by corporate bookies is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, not to mention extremely moralistic. And, in the end, prohibition never works - bookies still and always will exist.
> And, in the end, prohibition never works - bookies still and always will exist.
I don't think that's exactly true. Laws introduce varying degrees of friction for citizens to do something.
It's like entrepreneurship. If there are a bunch of laws in place making it hard to start a business, fewer people will start businesses. Some people will still create illegal businesses on the black market, but lots of law abiding citizens will just stop creating businesses because there's too much friction to bother.
That fails to acknowledge that a) the black market tends to be dramatically less safe b) it drives addicts underground where it's hard to identify and help them and c) the addicts this is meant to help will be disproportionately willing to participate in this new, much worse black market.
Bookies scale very well, a small number of them could serve whatever clientele is still interested.
It'll probably turn out similarly to drugs. Prohibition keeps your average citizen away, and makes the market much worse for anyone left in it.
>b) it drives addicts underground where it's hard to identify and help them
I'm not sure about B, it's pretty easy to identify an addict.
The problem I have with sports gambling is the massive commercialization and advertising. We don't tolerate it for cigarettes, and gambling addictions are much worse than cigarette addictions in terms of financial harm.
Gamblers know where to go, but the purpose of all the advertising is attract new gamblers, preferably the compulsive kind.
Another harm is what it does to the integrity of sports. There are famous cases like the 1919 White Sox and Pete Rose. The people who took part were banned for life for a reason.
What do you mean prohibition never works? Are you really going to claim legalizing sports betting a few years ago DIDNT increase gambling in the US? This doesn't strike me as a good faith comment just a platitude
There has never been a gambling prohibition as far as I’m aware - so I won’t address an imaginary argument. Hope that helps. However, an astute reader would realize that there have been multiple other attempts at prohibiting “vices” that have failed in spectacular fashion. I trust you can do your own research here and don’t need to belabor that point.
On gambling prohibitions though - one local one I can think of is the CA gambling market. California has decided
most forms of online gambling are “illegal,” (except the ones that have successfully lobbied for it), yet it is not enforced at all, only on corporate sites, which creates a massive black market that actually causes far more exposure to harm to consumers than legalization would. This isn’t a novel argument, it’s been debated for 20+ years and the results are pretty clear. I understand however people don’t seek nuance in these arguments and if your stance is “GAMBLING == BAD” I really don’t have much else to say here.
Sure, but if people, for example, started to declare bankruptcy due to gambling addiction, doesn't that mean that taxpayers like you and I are effectively subsidizing these gambling institutions?
That goes beyond moralism; most people don't want to pay higher taxes. I think that it's good that we have a safety-net for people who get into impossible levels of debt, but that does mean that we have an interest in figuring out ways to minimize how often bankruptcy is actually invoked.
Scratchers/lotto tickets are legal in most US states so I don’t really understand what point you’re trying to make here. This isn’t a new problem and the state has been profiting off of it for a while. The alternatives are a lot worse. You can’t legislate away vices.
I know, but I think that they're overwhelmingly used for glorified gambling.
It wouldn't bother me if it was just hedge funds or big corporations or multibillionaires who played with contracts, it bothers me that regular people do it too, and the average John Doe simply doesn't have the same multi-million-dollar option pricing algorithms that Goldman Sachs does. At that point, it feels like it's big corporations leeching money away from poorer people who don't know better.
Full disclosure, I do play with options occasionally, but I have mostly stopped, and I treat it like a casino, or as you mentioned to hedge against risk.
Most of the volume of options trading is done by institutions. By price it's mostly large traders paying each other to mitigate risk. Some smaller traders are getting chewed up in the process, but they are throwing themselves into the machine.
You make it sound like options exist for large traders to profit off individuals with access to less information. That's not how options are primarily used. That is however how sports betting is primarily used.
