172
Legalizing Sports Gambling Was a Huge Mistake
(www.theatlantic.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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I think the question to ask about this is why it's such a unique problem to america. Much like guns.
Here in the UK 15% of men do online gambling and 4% of women. Ok so the top line of data says that 40% of people do gambling but this is only because of scratchcards at petrol stations. When you remove these it drops to 15 and 4.
Why is this situation so significantly worse in america? What is unique about american society and culture that causes 33% of americans to be betting on sports, let alone other stuff?
Supreme court struck down a law banning sports gambling in 2018 on the logic that "illegal gambling is already happening, might as well make it legal and cut out the criminals!". The now-legal betting companies started pushing a non-stop torrent of pro-gambling ads immediately.
Australia is also pretty bad, see below:
So is the problem marketing?
I don't know what differences lie in the marketing that is allowed here vs US.
I think the apps originated in silicon valley, so they had tons of money behind them that was willing to make a marketing push. Ads for them were already present as early as 2015 IIRC, even when they were still technically illegal, but nobody got arrested that I know of.
Its also a major issue elsewhere. Australia for example has a pretty horrific gambling problem and the government rolled back promises to ban gambling advertising.
40%+ of people gambling on scratchoffs or the lottery is also quite bad tbh
I don't know about the societal effects but you might want to consider if it's just normalized, not actually better
I really don't think spending a quid once a week on a scratchcard is much of an issue though.
yeah I mean, if that's all it is, obviously its a relatively trivial issue. But when you extrapolate that to almost half of the population you are still exploiting people for a huge amount of profit (see elsewhere in the thread about the misleading ways it's sold as being for funding services or charities when often they receive no additional funds), acting as a regressive tax, and some percentage (at least like 3%) of those people are going to develop a serious gambling problem, and having gambling be widely available and normalized makes it much much harder for those people to stop.
But I believe its more heavily regulated in the UK so it may not be nearly as bad as the new wild west situation in the US.
is that what the data says is happening over there though? genuinely curious bc i worked at a convenience store (in the U.S.) for a while and people would routinely come in and dump their entire paychecks on scratch-offs. and then usually they'd spend their winnings on more.
Our brains our broken. I don't know how else to put it. They turn us into husks. Myself included.
I wonder if it's a case of them not really having culturally/socially adjusted to it like everyone else has. .
That and there's also a lot more sports going on that are insanely popular/that people are engaged with. Here it's mostly just football and horses. There its NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, NCAA and to a lesser extent: MLS, WNBA and NASCAR.
Maybe partially? It's been legal here since the 60s.
"Capitalism with American Characteristics" is a disease that is poisoning every part of society. I believe it breeds desperation and a "fuck it" attitude and drives people to reckless behavior, aggression, and distrust of others.
I'm not immune. I kind of hate most people, especially here. Society sucks, most people suck.
I think this is an interesting thing to discuss. Honestly we could do this for a lot of countries but for America especially. It's probably useful to normalise talking this way about socialism too.
Spanish here, absolutely not a unique problem to the US of A. Betting joints popped up EVERYWHERE some 5-10 years ago
Nor exclusive of the US, Brazil is loosing billions of dollars each year to that.
The UK is going to get a lot worse with all the betting advertising in football. Pretty much every second Premier League team has a betting sponsor at the moment. The marketing campaign has intensified and I can see those statistics doubling within the next few years.