alt Hacker NewsThe fact that ESPN itself has a sports betting app tells you all you need to know about the perversion of sports now that gambling is blessed by the government.
I think I can live with the legalization of sports betting if there are strong restrictions against marketing and advertising. If you want to ruin your life that's your decision, and you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock market. But the way that advertising has its tentacles in our culture now... it's bad.
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I'm surprised that people seem to just now realize that sports betting is a bad idea. As you said, the worst aspect is the large amount of marketing and advertising these platforms receive; I wouldn't care if they weren't pushed so heavily.
> you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock market.
I can't tell if you are promoting the stock market as a better or worse alternative to gambling?
If you meant the latter, you couldn't be further from the truth. The stock market, as a whole, represents the combined productivity of all the publicly traded firms in the country. Day to day, the stock market is unpredictably volatile. But over the long term (decades), it trends upward and by a large amount. There is no safer investment with the same kinds of returns and there is lots of research to prove it.
But short-term speculation and individual stock picking is much more akin to gambling.
Similarly as Lewis Black likes to point out, we're one of only 2 countries that advertises drugs to ourselves.
Policy towards pathological gambling, along with drugs, is an interesting and deep philosophical hole: To what extent do those things represent a kind of biochemical slavery, and if one cares about freedom/autonomy, should that mean letting people enslave themselves, or does it mean blocking them in the name of more freedom/autonomy overall?
>you can always just take the same amount of money and bet it on the stock market.
There's a big difference between betting on sports (zero sum) and buying stocks (ownership in a company), even if the latter can be silly at times.
As I said in the last discussion about this [1], I think outright banning just leads to worse outcomes, so you need to find a medium where you can minimize the abuse while still allowing people to get their hit enough to not go seek out unregulated forms.
I'm not fond of it either, but I don't have a better answer that doesn't seem like it's going to lead to worse outcomes.
It's worse than bad, I have seen betting ads and placement in content that regular advertisers would not touch with a 10 feet pole, e.g. in pirated broadcasts
Most gamblers are casuals. I spend $5-10 a week during football and usually am down like $10 at the end of the year. It provides a lot of entertainment, sucks that some people can’t control themselves but I shouldn’t be punished for that.
Agree that heavily regulating and perhaps banning advertising needs to be done.
I went to a local team baseball game and it was frankly depressing.
To see someone being put on the big screen to make some guess in a future inning with a plug for a bet site at a baseball game; frankly at this point just allow steroids again if you're selling out that bad.
Hot take: all advertising for any kind of gambling should be banned, and online gambling should be outright prohibited
> But the way that advertising has its tentacles in our culture now... it's bad.
Yes. But half of HN works in the advertising industry.
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"perversion of sports" is a particularly American viewpoint, I think! The latent streak of puritanism, maybe. Yet, somehow, the NCAA (which is wage theft on a truly industrial scale) is morally okay. It's weird.
(The intersection with US ad culture – for existence, drug ads on TV – is maybe also unique.)
Sport has, as a business, always been random number generation for gambling purposes. Some, like horseracing, have basically no other point. Gambling is going to happen, and like weed, it's probably better that it's regulated and taxed than entirely underground. There's no more gambling content now than there was fantasy football content before, and fantasy football was gambling too.
If we're looking for a perversion of sports, though, how about the NCAA's industrial-scale wage theft? US professional sports should have junior systems which pay the players like the rest of the world...
It has a terrible potential to corrupt sport. When you can bet a lot of money on how long a college players plays, or how many points they get in a particular game, what's to stop them from having a relative make a bet and they just fake a cramp?
The stock market is heavily regulated. I don't think you should ban sports betting, because like many vices it's easier to control if it is legal. According to Nate Silver, the more you let people make bets on obscure things the more opportunity their is for participants to cheat. So you should probably restrict betting to things no one participant can control (like the score). You also should try to make it difficult for a person to lose too much. You can't stop it, but you could probably make it harder. In the stock market there is a "qualified investor" that is allowed to take much bigger risks. You could make rules to punish betting sites that accept too many bets from destitute addicts. It wouldn't be perfect, but you can have liquor laws without having prohibition.