I suspect most of the fraud by volume is going to be committed in the lower leagues in most nations just do to more access to individuals and less scrutiny.

I follow baseball and multiple members of the team I watch have had articles written about death threats they get. For instance https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/giants/article/mlb-threat...

Not to mention the allegations of match fixing. As a massive college football (American) fan, every outcome that someone doesn't like is questioned on every forum as "the refs had a bet on it" or whatever.

That's a matter of opinion. There are those of us that believe that it is a gross violation of one's human rights to dictate how they're allowed to spend the money that they earned.

It's a side effect of liberty that people can choose to put themselves into deep suffering. I know people who do the same by blowing all of their money on designer clothes or expensive cars. Nobody is talking about regulating poor people wasting money on those things.

If you earn the money, you're entitled to piss it away. Them's the breaks.

Advertising needs to be more targeted if anything. I don't want to see a bunch of irrelevant junk - I want to see high quality products that are useful to my life.

We clearly subscribe to option 2 in the United States. We don't allow access to medication based on your own volition. We don't allow access to medical procedures based on your own volition.

> So as long as these websites aren't defrauding the customers with fake stats, there really is nothing wrong.

This is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.

This framing is nonsense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

You frame as if agency exists, then exploitive coercion doesn't exist.

We can respect the agency of folks to smoke or drink, while also criminalizing lying to entire populations about the known health effects of your products.

We can respect people as having agency, while also acknowledging that psy-ops like those run by Cambridge Analytica, or even normal psy-ops like mass market advertising, can influence groups of people through deceptive or manipulative ways in aggregate and cause massive harms.

We can respect personal agency while also acknowledging some folks have addiction problems, addictions problems be intentionally manufactured by products and platforms. There is a balance between allowing a poker game, and allowing the MGM Grand to plant a limo driver in a recovering addict's driveway.

We can respect agency while acknowledging those with large reach because of wealth can cause mass harm through media, influence and coercion if unregulated.

We can grant authorities to police and politicians without Qualified Immunity from consequences of their actions.

Do you know what an addiction is?

What about fallible, gullible, with full agency?

You're treating the state as "we". It certainly claims to be "us", but that claim is - for most world states - partially, or entirely, invalid.

Also, on a semi-related note - there is the legality of gambling, the legality of running a gambling operation, and the legality of doing so for pecuniary gain, and it is possible for just part of these three to be illegal.

Do you honestly trust these companies to not mislead their customers

I think legalizing cannabis was more about not jailing people for consuming a plant.

It's hard to respect a legal system that jails someone who wasn't hurting anyone. Repealing a law that criminalizes victimless behavior, especially when so many people already break it, paradoxically increases respect for other laws. It reinforces that the law serves a purpose: protecting people and promoting the general welfare.

You know prositution is already legal in certain counties in Nevada, and it's been that way since '71?

The list is far longer than you've mentioned.

Here's a list of things you're allowed to profit on either as an investor or as a participant that are quite wild: Fighting with gloves (more lethal than bare-knuckle), bare-knuckle fights, kids in contact sports (even combat sports), throwing away perfectly good food in order to lower taxable income, not planting a crop specifically because it wouldn't make enough profit, gig-economy not paying living wages, a minimum wage below living wage, predatory lending, algorithmic social media that swings elections, targetted advertisement psyops, marketing to children, cosmetic surgery in general but especially for children, forced conversion 'therapy', experimental life saving treatments gate-kept by money, planned obsolescence, plastic packaging...

In combat sports, we're really not too far removed from the collisuem, just that it's "not meant to be to the death" even though it does often result in death or lifelong conditions. The fighters get paid, the organizers get paid, the arena gets paid, the advertisers get paid...All in the name of watching someone not quite kill someone.

Hell, we've even still got slavery tucked neatly away behind "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.", but we know that many sitting in prison are demonstrably innocent. The prison is allowed to require that every inmate works. You're allowed to run an organization that profits from these slaves. You are not legally required to pay in some states.

Sorry but Sunday blue laws are religious discrimination. It’s just a day and businesses shouldn’t be restricted by a single religious sect. Gambling and substance abuse are actual public health issues.

Capital constantly needs new frontiers to exploit, and therefore must remove moral and social obstacles that stand in its way. Pseudo-prostitution has already been made widespread via platforms like OnlyFans, it's only a matter of time before in-the-flesh prostitution follows, as you said.

It's curious to me that so many progressives or soi-disant leftists are in favor of dissolving these types of moral and social traditions while being fervently anti-capitalist. It seems that they (meaning the subset who are always looking for new fenceposts to tear down) are in fact the shock troops of Capital.

The idea that putting substances into one's own body is somehow immoral is itself an inducement to the violation of the rights of others.

Your morals have nothing to do with what others do with their own body.

> I predict this trend will continue all the way to prostitution

Probably. We don't call it prostitution anymore it's now called, "sex work."

Are you several hundred years old?

At least where I live it is explicitly permitted as long as you get government authorization: https://igb.illinois.gov/sports-wagering/sports-authorized-o...