It was banned most everywhere, then with no public debate on the subject, much less consensus, all of a sudden it was legal and in your face wherever you went. If it's going to be made legal, it needs to be justified, rather than there needing to be justification for making it illegal. I personally think it would have a high bar to overcome.

I personally don't participate in it and don't really find it interesting at all. For the longest time it was fairly normal to bet among friends, but I do know some people who seem to obsess now over sports betting to what feel like unhealthy levels.

I really don't care and I'm definitely on your side where I think people should be allowed to do what they want in this regard.

The crossing of line for me though is that this is now being advertised on TV and practically everywhere and being normalized for children and teenagers.

Call me a cynic, but I think the real goal in the long term for these companies is to get people addicted to it and to normalize it from a young age while they're more impressionable and thats where I believe the true harm is.

That problem 1%* isnt just ruining their own lives, it often spreads to everyone around them. Gambling has a lot of externalities that hit other people. Parents gambling takes away resources from children, gamblers engaging in fraud and and identity theft, workplace theft, embezzelment etc. Also strongly linked to higher rates of domestic violence and violent crime. It dispropotionally affects lower socio-economic groups.

*It may be much higher than 1%

https://www.unsw.edu.au/news/2024/10/new-commission-calls-fo...

Percentage increases, and the phrase "X% more likely", are usually quite ambiguous. I wish more people would tell you whether they mean absolute or relative increases. E.g., if (numbers made up for example) 0.5% of the general population are delinquent in credit, but 1% of gamblers are delinquent, then you could report that as either a 0.5% increase (absolute) or a 100% increase (relative). Which one people choose often has a lot to do with the impression they're trying to give: are they trying to panic you, or give you actual facts?

And knowing the baseline of a relative increase can matter a lot. If something goes from a 0.001% to a 0.002% chance of happening, that relative 100% increase means very little. If it goes from a 50% chance of happening to a 100% chance, that same relative 100% increase means a lot: it's gone from a coin-flip to a certainty.

It takes a village. Especially if the problem is systemic and not just the individual. When you count the number of people with some addiction or the other the total represents how many people havent found anything better to do within the system. Thats like finding cells in your brain that are busy looping randomly not fully attached in some useful way to the system. Ofcourse you can zap them and isolate them or remove them but the imaginative solution is reattach them and make them useful to the system in some way. Cause the brains that do will have larger capacities and capabilities than brains that dont.

> 0.5% increase in credit delinquency rates over 3 years feels... underwhelming.

The number works out to just over 800,000 people in the US

0.5% total increase seems pretty small to me too. It looks like it's pretty much increasing linearly though, so it's possible that in ten years it will be at 3% or something, which I think would be concerning. It's hard to tell whether that will continue, or whether we'll hit a natural steady state, but it seems like we're not at the steady state yet.

I was surprised by that too, but maybe we're too early. It's hard to put a precise point on it without hard data, but it just feels like gambling was better when you could do it in two places (Vegas, Atlantic City, maybe to a lessor extent at the horse track) and you had to actually travel there to make a big show of it. And you also felt a little bad about it.

When I turn on sports today it's just in your face gambling all the time. I think we'll come to regret this.

I agree. Ban the advertising and promotion of it, like we do for cigarettes, because the industry is really predatory, but leave people the choice.

I mean…keep reading.

For the affected population, it’s around 10 percentage points—or double.

So people who sports bet are twice as likely to be delinquent as those who don’t. I’ll give you that the effect is smaller than I expected.

Here’s the thing though…it’s not like that trend is slowing down. The finalization of prediction markets and continued normalization of betting as a pro-social behavior is currently headed to the moon…so we should ask if it’s causing major side effects.

Smoking makes someone 25x more likely to develop lung cancer. Right now it looks like sports betting makes you 2x more likely to be delinquent on your car loan. At what incidence does that become anti-social enough to try to curb?

As a fellow citizen we should stop letting this stuff be advertised and shoved down our throats.

You can barely even watch sports these days without interacting with betting, who is this helping?

If people want to seek out destruction, let them. But don't advertise and glamorize self-destruction by letting these people pay famous people to make their platforms look like the place to be, or have open discussion of their vice embedded in the broadcasting.