To be fair, what you’ve describing strikes me as closer to hospitality than gambling per se. I live in a ski town. There are absolutely regulars at the Four Seasons who tip well in exchange for being “friends” with the staff. The fact that they never hang out outside work hours doesn’t seem to bother them.

Algorithmic optimisation will be the death of us.

Over-dramatic? Maybe, but this thought springs to my mind more and more.

> It increases GDP

I want this rigorously studied.

If it does, I’m more open to it. I don’t think it does. It’s a minuscule industry, macroeconomically spwaking, with massive negative externalities. I think regulating the marketing and conduct of industries proximate to addiction is something productive societies do. (On the other side of the spectrum we have the Qing.)

It would be interesting to make that sort of thing generic. A law couldn’t legalize something without backporting the legalization.

Pete Rose: reprehensible pariah or radical pioneer?

> Remember when alcohol was illegal?

I don’t really gamble. But I agree with you. Prohibition is never the answer.

Our current regime, however, is one where bartenders face zero liability for their patrons’ drunk driving. Making gambling companies liable for problematic gambling is a good start. Banning gambling ads, within apps and without, is a great end. I’d also argue for a cap on bet sizes, but I’m open to being talked out of that.

These are systems completely designed to prey on vulnerable people, addicts who can't control their impulse to gamble. That's their purpose. I think it's worth regulating intentionally predatory and harmful industries.

I guess you also think we need to stop policing drunk driving? Because the reasons for regulating gambling are similar.

Let's combine the idea of hyper-targeted advertising based on mass data collection with custom tailored addicted substances.

If I design a chemical that will specifically make you fasterik so dependent on it that you'll do any sexually depraved things random strangers want so that they'll give you pocket change so that you can get another hit of that chemical should it be illegal for me to surreptitiously give it to you in a product that you buy from me?

Why or why not?

Adults can and do become addicted to gambling (and drugs, etc.) and ruin the lives of themselves and those around them.

Recognizing this fact isn't treating them like children, it's treating them like the adults they are.

There's a fine line between prohibition and all-out attack, everywhere all at once, from TV internet and sports, trying to get everyone addicted to gambling, from 9 to 99 years old.

Like... cigarretes aren't prohibited. But you're hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't agree that we're MUCH better off now with full advertising bans, indoor smoking bans, bans on sales to minors, steep tax, etc, than what we were in the 70s with disgusting cigarrete smoke everywhere.

And yet you can't do a quick Google search to understand that "expecting adults to act like adults" is a ridiculous idea when 80% of people have NPC agency

Prohibition was a mistake and it goes a long way of sorting how people will act stupid regardless

I agree with your point, its something i kinda didn't really consider how its perversely intertwining itself with the education budget and making itself effectively immune. I still think its a solid demonstration that comparable sports betting legislation surely lacked any sort of compromise at all, as it was all pushed through so aggressively fast.

I'm not sure you read that article all the way through... The loss is $450k, but that's only 3% of the year's state aid and an even smaller amount of the district's operating budget. And it only impacted that one year. Inflation and random political feuds usually impact public school budgets to a far greater degree.

The problem in this case is not that the lotto exists, it's that the formula for awarding school funding is (or was?) broken in this state. This is a textbook example of why you almost always use the median instead of mean on things that have a bell curve.

Even if you don’t profit but place what looks like smart bets

You can just jump bookies.

Except in the state of MA.

They rightfully passed legislation banning such practices. The idea is that if casinos and bookies refuse to cap your downside, they have zero right to cap your upside.

You do have to be careful to avoid letting whales manipulate the perceived market. There are ways to con other gamblers with carefully timed bets.

The bigger the market the harder that is, so maybe it doesn't apply at the level of online sports betting. But organized crime could make trouble at horse tracks.

Tony is also super smart in how he gambled. Your average degenerate is nowhere near as intelligent as Tony is.

I have a very small edge in sports betting although I don't really do any of the deep overpriced/underpriced arbitrage or any special types of bets outside of wins/loses. And it's limited to tennis, a sport I've played my entire life and have followed the pro circuit closely for 3 decades. And even then my edge is very small, and the strategy I use when I do bet doesn't make me much in total return.

Never heard of him

What's the ev for going to college once you factor in graduation rates?

People that get two or three years of college debt and no diploma have a big hole to fill and a small shovel.

Anyway, I think ev isn't the right tool to model gambling behavior; dollar utility isn't linear. It's more about a small spending for a large potential. But then you get into repeated small wagers and such.

I think so. If you're going to regulate sports betting (and I think there are good arguments for doing that), but you yourself run a lottery which is a tax on people who don't understand probability, then you are just preaching in a "do as I say not as I do" kind of way.

> doesn't it add anxiety as you watch the game?

I don’t generally like gambling. On a recent trip to Vegas I socially gambled with friends and won about $5k, but then lost $500 of it and was more annoyed about losing that sum than the net amount gained. Such is my personality.

That said, a friendly game of poker is absolutely more fun with a $10 buy-in or whatnot. So I can see the general idea holding water. What we don’t need are (a) ads or (b) large bets.

> Does it really make games more interesting?

> If anything, doesn't it add anxiety as you watch the game?

> Is anxiety interesting?

Yes. Adding anxiety generally makes things more interesting. Think of watching a story or a film or a game play out. Good stories often involve giving the reader some anxiety. Tension. Not knowing what's going to happen, but being somehow invested in it ... to stay engaged.

Yeah I've never made a prop bet, or even a points bet, that feels too degenerate to me. I have occasionally made a $10 money line bet on a game and that does make it more interesting to me in that now I have a small stake in the outcome. YMMV.

And people do spend stupid amounts of money on Powerball tickets too. I just think if the state is running a numbers racket, that they don't have much of a leg to stand on when they want to regulate other gambling.