Since we're taking the day for navel gazing i will say it makes me a bit sad that someone would take a contemplative, soul-refreshing activity like hiking one of our national trails and turn it into a competition where there's a "winner". It's like making a contest out of praying the best.
Also, pit bulls are my favorite puppers next to chihuahuas. In fact i have a pit bull and two chihuahuas, and if someone ever threatened any them with a shovel it'd go very badly for him.
There's been a few anti-online gambling coalitions that count casino magnates as allies. I believe the Adelsons lobbied the Trump administration against online gambling.
I worry our culture has lost the ability to restrict policies that create acute harms. We're too atomized. There's a profound discomfort limiting our own freedoms which we can exercise responsibly for those who cannot.
We've become libertines in all manners outside of sex. It's a pretty weird time.
There's a lot to be said, and commended, about personal achievement. I don't criticize the attempt to achieve a record setting thru-hike of the A.T. or any other long distance hiking trail. Still, I'm somewhat uneasy with the concept. That's a result of the 20+ years I was able to commit to building, rebuilding, and maintaining sections of the A.T. in Virginia and Maryland as well as training and leading other volunteers, young and not-so-young, in those efforts. Here's a peek at our work:
You are not going to like this, JVL, but when it comes to online gambling/sports betting/etc...you need to mind your own damn business PDQ.
If a person chooses to engage in online gambling, then that is *THEIR* decision. If they are a legal adult of sound mind and have their own money and online gambling is legal in their locality, then you need really need to butt out.
I am not a libertarian, but I do know how to stick to my lane. If you throw the old "we need to protect people from their own addictive impulses" nugget at me, then I will return with a Steffi Graf backhand slice and say "Like we did with Prohibition and the War on Drugs? We made ancillary crimes related to liquor and drug trafficking such as murder, extortion, and public corruption significantly worse when we tried to protect people from themselves. We also exponentially empowered organized crime groups around the world". There are times when I am fully onboard with your Jesuitical moralizing, and then there are times when I think your Jesuitical moralizing indicates that you and your kids need to go take a nice relaxing walk on the beach out at Assateague and forget the modern world for a couple of hours...and this is one of those times. You have a brilliant writer's mind, but sometimes, you just bring out the "Settle down, Beavis" instinct in people.
For the record, I am saying this as someone who has been in drug & alcohol recovery since 1990--6 weeks at Betty's Place. I understand addiction. I also understand that if a person has an addiction issue, then that person has to make the choice to get better--we cannot make that decision for them because ultimately, that will not work and you can make the problem worse. I understand where you are coming from, but suggesting we take away a person's intellectual and moral agency is not helpful.
The anti-libertarian argument is not simply a moral one, though it it is certainly that. A really good reason to help people is that the longer we put off helping them, the worse the situation gets for all of us. Even if you were to decide that "people put themselves in their sorry state" and begin to let them die in the streets, you've got a big problem. At some point the cost of security for yourself and your family gets prohibitive. That recent thing about "Eat the Rich" is not just idle chatter. Further, the cost of a broken down society on all undertakings, of all members of society, becomes too great to bear. Better to fix it up early when it's still relatively manageable.
In this particular case what's happening is really a form of fraud. That's a straight up legal issue as well. The fact a bot is doing it is the exact fraud.
I've never had a complete, cogent argument for why legalized gambling is bad. Even after reading this, I still don't have the complete argument, but one thing is crystal clear: online gambling on any kind is extraordinarily foolish. I love this Triad today, JVL. Keep them coming, I'm almost commenting here today, so we don't have a repeat of the Frank Rizzo episode. We ARE engaged, JVL! :)
I want to point out that an activist government would well understand the danger of algorithmic computer power on all aspects of society, and they would be moving to neutralize them. An example of this the lawsuit against Realpage for fixing rent prices. But Amazon, and really any online retailer, fix prices all the time. This lack of transparency and price fixing cost consumers huge amounts of real dollars. I'm not sure how to solve this, but then add gambling and card playing bots to the equation, and we are in a bad place. The only poker game I'm ever going to play again with real money is one around my own kitchen table with friend for low stakes.
I also want to point out that there is an 80/20 rule going on here. I'm reminded of a great WaPo article about alcohol consumption from years ago: They found that about 20% of the consumers accounted for 80% of the profits from alcohol sales. That implies some real social harm, hiding in plain sight. Same with gambling.
Finally, I've mentioned it before, but a libertarian friend and I argue over email all the time. He sends me John Stossel's column, and my head predictably explodes. It has always seemed like fantasy to me. It has to it a utopian ring, "Everything will be perfect, if..." But isn't. The world is more complicated. Individual actions have collective harms (and sometimes benefits?). I have found this in nearly every argument about libertarianism: "First of all, the libertarian view always fades out before the consequences set in." Yes, JVL, exactly this.
I have to say I've always been highly skeptical of the libertarian philosphies cause in my own life those who expose the most libertarian ideas tend to be the first to complain about the potholes in the road.
And furthermore, there is the incessant promotion of online betting — not just on sports networks but even within telecasts of sporting events themselves. SNY (Sports New York) even has two hours of Draft Kings programming every weekday morning.
The societal and economic effects of legalized gambling are enormous. For sure, the obscenely wealthy owners of the online sites have enough politicians in their pockets to ensure that the toothpaste will never return to the tube. Alas!
And, especially given the remarkably changed environment, Pete Rose must be allowed to be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame!
I think there will eventually be a reckoning. But it will take a long time.
The good news is that we are seeing that reckoning in kids’ use of cell phones (schools taking them away during school hours), and some forms of financial regulation after the 2008 crisis.
But it will take far longer than we would like and will unnecessarily wreck many more families.
Also since we are talking about gambling regulation . . . Can someone start a policy dicussion about banning/ more throughly regulating lottery scratch offs?
The price to reward ratio of some that I've seen definitely seem to be bordering on state sponsored predation.
“the libertarian view always fades out before the consequences set in.”
For much of the 90s until around 2008/9 my husband was a Libertarian. Used to hand out literature at the county fair, lifetime subscription to Reason, all of it. After the financial crisis, I noticed he didn’t talk about it much anymore. I asked him why.
“when the bottom fell out and people who had always played by the rules lost everything, my party offered nothing. Some felt bad. Many did not. It was just had luck. I figured, eff that for a bag of hammers.”
You are, as usual, 100% correct about the pernicious affect of legalized online sports betting.
As a former addicted fantasy sports league player, I can tell you from experience the negative effects of online sports gambling. Prior to the full on onslaught of online sports betting, I would join 20+ fantasy sports leagues for every sport available each season. For a$20 entry fee, I could play to win $100.
It turned into a full time "job" managing the teams with trading and add/drops and setting the lineups.
I even started doing the league drafts during work hours.
I quit just as CBS sports line was joined by Fantrax in offering fantasy sports leagues for money rewards.
I could only lose $400 4 times a year (football, hockey, basketball, baseball).
I actually was quite good at it, so I was breaking even until the last year when the the competition improved significantly.
I quit then.
When I saw what the legalized online sports gambling was offering (bets on the game, even individual players, even granular scores within the game), I knew this would be bad.
There's nothing like the dopamine hit from winning a bet.
I was out of the fantasy sports leagues, but I could see where I could have been drawn into every day, every hour, every minute sports gambling now available from Fantrax, MGM, Fanduel, Caesars, DraftKing, etc.
I see all the ads from these sites, I see the "hook" offers of "bet $5 and we'll give you $250 to bet with" and I know this is not going to turn out well for some people!!!
Like you point out, when you have in your pocket all day, every day, the source of your next dopamine "hit", watch out America!!
I. Nelson Rose, a professor at Whittier Law School, wrote a book about gambling in the 1980s called Gambling and the Law (who would have guessed). He predicted the ebb and flow of the current on line march we are now seeing. Just noticed that he took two more stabs at gambling related law works but I have not read those.
Since we're taking the day for navel gazing i will say it makes me a bit sad that someone would take a contemplative, soul-refreshing activity like hiking one of our national trails and turn it into a competition where there's a "winner". It's like making a contest out of praying the best.
Also, pit bulls are my favorite puppers next to chihuahuas. In fact i have a pit bull and two chihuahuas, and if someone ever threatened any them with a shovel it'd go very badly for him.
There's been a few anti-online gambling coalitions that count casino magnates as allies. I believe the Adelsons lobbied the Trump administration against online gambling.
I worry our culture has lost the ability to restrict policies that create acute harms. We're too atomized. There's a profound discomfort limiting our own freedoms which we can exercise responsibly for those who cannot.
We've become libertines in all manners outside of sex. It's a pretty weird time.
There's a lot to be said, and commended, about personal achievement. I don't criticize the attempt to achieve a record setting thru-hike of the A.T. or any other long distance hiking trail. Still, I'm somewhat uneasy with the concept. That's a result of the 20+ years I was able to commit to building, rebuilding, and maintaining sections of the A.T. in Virginia and Maryland as well as training and leading other volunteers, young and not-so-young, in those efforts. Here's a peek at our work:
https://www.southshenandoah.net/
You are not going to like this, JVL, but when it comes to online gambling/sports betting/etc...you need to mind your own damn business PDQ.
If a person chooses to engage in online gambling, then that is *THEIR* decision. If they are a legal adult of sound mind and have their own money and online gambling is legal in their locality, then you need really need to butt out.
I am not a libertarian, but I do know how to stick to my lane. If you throw the old "we need to protect people from their own addictive impulses" nugget at me, then I will return with a Steffi Graf backhand slice and say "Like we did with Prohibition and the War on Drugs? We made ancillary crimes related to liquor and drug trafficking such as murder, extortion, and public corruption significantly worse when we tried to protect people from themselves. We also exponentially empowered organized crime groups around the world". There are times when I am fully onboard with your Jesuitical moralizing, and then there are times when I think your Jesuitical moralizing indicates that you and your kids need to go take a nice relaxing walk on the beach out at Assateague and forget the modern world for a couple of hours...and this is one of those times. You have a brilliant writer's mind, but sometimes, you just bring out the "Settle down, Beavis" instinct in people.
For the record, I am saying this as someone who has been in drug & alcohol recovery since 1990--6 weeks at Betty's Place. I understand addiction. I also understand that if a person has an addiction issue, then that person has to make the choice to get better--we cannot make that decision for them because ultimately, that will not work and you can make the problem worse. I understand where you are coming from, but suggesting we take away a person's intellectual and moral agency is not helpful.
The anti-libertarian argument is not simply a moral one, though it it is certainly that. A really good reason to help people is that the longer we put off helping them, the worse the situation gets for all of us. Even if you were to decide that "people put themselves in their sorry state" and begin to let them die in the streets, you've got a big problem. At some point the cost of security for yourself and your family gets prohibitive. That recent thing about "Eat the Rich" is not just idle chatter. Further, the cost of a broken down society on all undertakings, of all members of society, becomes too great to bear. Better to fix it up early when it's still relatively manageable.
In this particular case what's happening is really a form of fraud. That's a straight up legal issue as well. The fact a bot is doing it is the exact fraud.
I've never had a complete, cogent argument for why legalized gambling is bad. Even after reading this, I still don't have the complete argument, but one thing is crystal clear: online gambling on any kind is extraordinarily foolish. I love this Triad today, JVL. Keep them coming, I'm almost commenting here today, so we don't have a repeat of the Frank Rizzo episode. We ARE engaged, JVL! :)
I want to point out that an activist government would well understand the danger of algorithmic computer power on all aspects of society, and they would be moving to neutralize them. An example of this the lawsuit against Realpage for fixing rent prices. But Amazon, and really any online retailer, fix prices all the time. This lack of transparency and price fixing cost consumers huge amounts of real dollars. I'm not sure how to solve this, but then add gambling and card playing bots to the equation, and we are in a bad place. The only poker game I'm ever going to play again with real money is one around my own kitchen table with friend for low stakes.
I also want to point out that there is an 80/20 rule going on here. I'm reminded of a great WaPo article about alcohol consumption from years ago: They found that about 20% of the consumers accounted for 80% of the profits from alcohol sales. That implies some real social harm, hiding in plain sight. Same with gambling.
Finally, I've mentioned it before, but a libertarian friend and I argue over email all the time. He sends me John Stossel's column, and my head predictably explodes. It has always seemed like fantasy to me. It has to it a utopian ring, "Everything will be perfect, if..." But isn't. The world is more complicated. Individual actions have collective harms (and sometimes benefits?). I have found this in nearly every argument about libertarianism: "First of all, the libertarian view always fades out before the consequences set in." Yes, JVL, exactly this.
No way Sarah reads this. No way she understands gaming in anyway.
I have to say I've always been highly skeptical of the libertarian philosphies cause in my own life those who expose the most libertarian ideas tend to be the first to complain about the potholes in the road.
And furthermore, there is the incessant promotion of online betting — not just on sports networks but even within telecasts of sporting events themselves. SNY (Sports New York) even has two hours of Draft Kings programming every weekday morning.
The societal and economic effects of legalized gambling are enormous. For sure, the obscenely wealthy owners of the online sites have enough politicians in their pockets to ensure that the toothpaste will never return to the tube. Alas!
And, especially given the remarkably changed environment, Pete Rose must be allowed to be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame!
I don’t know…
I think there will eventually be a reckoning. But it will take a long time.
The good news is that we are seeing that reckoning in kids’ use of cell phones (schools taking them away during school hours), and some forms of financial regulation after the 2008 crisis.
But it will take far longer than we would like and will unnecessarily wreck many more families.
I think our society would be better off if we praised those in the village a little more and those in the river a little less.
Thank you for taking a couple of days off from the Presidential campaigning. If I never hear his name aloud again, I will be very grateful.☺️
Also since we are talking about gambling regulation . . . Can someone start a policy dicussion about banning/ more throughly regulating lottery scratch offs?
The price to reward ratio of some that I've seen definitely seem to be bordering on state sponsored predation.
“the libertarian view always fades out before the consequences set in.”
For much of the 90s until around 2008/9 my husband was a Libertarian. Used to hand out literature at the county fair, lifetime subscription to Reason, all of it. After the financial crisis, I noticed he didn’t talk about it much anymore. I asked him why.
“when the bottom fell out and people who had always played by the rules lost everything, my party offered nothing. Some felt bad. Many did not. It was just had luck. I figured, eff that for a bag of hammers.”
All the sites that are trying to promote election betting scare me.
JVL,
You are, as usual, 100% correct about the pernicious affect of legalized online sports betting.
As a former addicted fantasy sports league player, I can tell you from experience the negative effects of online sports gambling. Prior to the full on onslaught of online sports betting, I would join 20+ fantasy sports leagues for every sport available each season. For a$20 entry fee, I could play to win $100.
It turned into a full time "job" managing the teams with trading and add/drops and setting the lineups.
I even started doing the league drafts during work hours.
I quit just as CBS sports line was joined by Fantrax in offering fantasy sports leagues for money rewards.
I could only lose $400 4 times a year (football, hockey, basketball, baseball).
I actually was quite good at it, so I was breaking even until the last year when the the competition improved significantly.
I quit then.
When I saw what the legalized online sports gambling was offering (bets on the game, even individual players, even granular scores within the game), I knew this would be bad.
There's nothing like the dopamine hit from winning a bet.
I was out of the fantasy sports leagues, but I could see where I could have been drawn into every day, every hour, every minute sports gambling now available from Fantrax, MGM, Fanduel, Caesars, DraftKing, etc.
I see all the ads from these sites, I see the "hook" offers of "bet $5 and we'll give you $250 to bet with" and I know this is not going to turn out well for some people!!!
Like you point out, when you have in your pocket all day, every day, the source of your next dopamine "hit", watch out America!!
Wi
I. Nelson Rose, a professor at Whittier Law School, wrote a book about gambling in the 1980s called Gambling and the Law (who would have guessed). He predicted the ebb and flow of the current on line march we are now seeing. Just noticed that he took two more stabs at gambling related law works but I have not read those.