Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we've had to ask you many times not to. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

(p.s. Just to pre-empt the usual: no, this is not a defense of Big Gambling, just an attempted defense of HN thread quality.)

Exactly. Gambling in the real world involved friction. That plus a certain social stigma if you gambled outside of “mainstream” casinos.

And this helped weed out all but the most addicted gamblers. Now there is no friction, the platforms are free to create dark patterns to encourage problem gambling, and the vice has zero social cost.

The court ruling was a good one, and anticipated. The federal government can either allow all gambling, or ban it all. They can’t pick and choose states where it may be allowed.

Exactly. The corruption and rot is beyond the pale.

Probation was a thing, too. How did that turn out?