Gambling addiction has always existed but making it where you have to physically show up somewhere to do it is actually a highly effective deterrent vs. being able to click a button on your phone and get an app for it.

There is data from the past 10 years showing a direct spike in bankruptcies, divorces, foreclosures, suicide, and domestic violence (yes, really) as soon as DraftKings-style gambling is legalized in a state.

> despair, desperation and hopelessness

These are certainly factors, and yes we should have better mental health treatment and job opportunities in the US, etc.

But it's an incomplete picture of what's happening. There are billion-dollar companies with teams of advanced psychologists crafting the most addictive experience possible, and specifically targeting problem gamblers, with these new apps. It's industrialized and predatory. People with happy fulfilling lives and careers are still falling for it, not just hopeless impoverished people. Saying it's only about mental health and despair is framing it as an individual failing and ignoring the huge industry creating it this way.

The apps and the companies behind them really brought in a dangerous paradigm shift and the data is already here to show it.

> There are billion-dollar companies with teams of advanced psychologists crafting the most addictive experience possible … It's industrialized and predatory.

Sorry, I thought this was a discussion about gambling, not Facebook and TikTok and YouTube and Whatnot and OpenAI and EA and Roblox and every other company that invents a problem (oh no, your hair isn’t shiny!) and uses psychological manipulation to sell you a solution. :-)

Jokes aside, the fact that this sort of predatory behaviour is showing up in multiple industries with broadly similar characteristics (giant corporations with immense wealth concentrations who are not part of the communities they serve and whose only interest is in sucking up all the money) suggests that there are some deeper problems here, and that focusing on the gambling industry is focusing on a red herring (or perhaps the most obvious canary to date, to stick with bird metaphors).

> Saying it's only about mental health and despair is framing it as an individual failing

Not at all! Despair is the outcome of a broken system.