Young men face high risk for gambling addiction as sports betting surges:experts

https://nypost.com/2024/01/01/lifestyle/young-men-face-high-risk-for-gambling-addiction-as-sports-betting-surges-experts/

by MoBarouma • 3 years ago

40 47 3 years ago

nypost.com

castrodd• 3 years ago

I find it difficult to watch any sports these days because you are just constantly bombarded with sports betting ads and tie-ins. I have absolutely no interest in throwing my money away on sports bets and yet even I find myself wondering if I should try it out or maybe I could just open a trial account. It's dangerous and disappointing that this is the direction that all the major sports leagues are heading.

xuki2• 3 years ago

We need a real life adblock.

Fuzzwah3• 3 years ago

That's called regulation. Proven to work many times over.

Mountain_Skies• 3 years ago

Disabling the center channel of a surround sound system usually will kill the commentary during sporting events. Gets rid of it in a decent chunk of commercials too.

imbnwa• 3 years ago

I'm rather surprised at the return on spending on inline ads by gambling houses considering how much paperwork/fructuib there is setting up a DraftKings account on the spot.

add-sub-mul-div• 3 years ago

I agree. I don't have a moral problem with sports betting but it's not only commercial breaks, it's completely invaded the content itself. Sports commentary has become inseparable from betting and though I have no temptation, every minute of the content feels like predatory advertising. It's not fun anymore.

chiefalchemist• 3 years ago

I sometimes listen to sport's radio and sometimes - too often - it's unlistenable. Too much focus on betting and no enough on the actual sports. I cringe when the shows' hosts talking about their personal betting.

teeray2• 3 years ago

“You can be gambling away your house on your mobile phone sitting at the dinner table, and not a single person will know until the devastation of your whole family is complete”

That sounds like a reasonable means of control then. These services could be locked to networks at locations with some kind of gaming license (something like a Keno license).

w-ll• 3 years ago

I've heard of people going just across statelines to the first cell tower that reports them in a legal state, just ideling in their car gambling away.

teeray2• 3 years ago

There’s outliers in everything, but forcing people to go somewhere to gamble gets the cookies out of the house. Loved ones can notice the destructive behavior before it’s too late. It will not stop people from being ruined by it, but it will make progress.

beambot• 3 years ago

Not that dissimilar from unfettered options trading on mass-market brokerage apps like Robinhood...

mistrial9• 3 years ago

Why is the Silicon Valley Bank sign still on the rotunda on Market Street ? btw

smt88• 3 years ago

As far as I've read, it's psychologically identical. The scary thing about financial gambling like options-, day-, or forex-trading is that they seem respectable. Laypeople don't usually know that the person is gambling, and some people even think of it as a legitimate job.

Terr_2• 3 years ago

That reminds me of a book quote I saw today, reproduced within another work about financial fraud. ("Lying for Money".)

For the most part, it was based on two simple truths: first, that a majority of the richest one percent of Americans are closet degenerate gamblers, who can't withstand the temptation to keep rolling the dice again and again, even if they know the dice are loaded against them; and, second, that contrary to previous assumptions, young men and women who possess the collective social graces of a herd of sex-crazed water buffalo and have an intelligence quotient in the range of Forrest Gump on three hits of acid, can be taught to sound like Wall Street wizards [...]

-- The Wolf of Wall Street

sarchertech2• 3 years ago

There are similarities, but figuring out options trading on Robinhood is significantly more difficult. And I’m not bombarded with ads for options trading dozens of times per football game.

darth_avocado• 3 years ago

Or crypto

goles• 3 years ago

Cryptocurrency trading & high risk stocks was part of the dataset of the study[1]. They also compare it to other gambling activities and risk groups further down.

[1](pdf)https://socialwork.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/2023-10/P...

cf12412908415• 3 years ago

There is also an argument to be made that actual gambling has less of a negative social impact.

Having been bored during the pandemic and gotten myself some gambling tokens at a brokerage site it turned out that i almost kinda funded some pretty severe human rights violations. Drones dropping grenades and mortar shells on indigenous people with bow and arrow type of stuff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSf3268tAbg

Maybe check your portfolio for Freeport-McMoRan

Funnily enough, the youtuber that made the video also had his house fire bombed by organized crime for reporting on Australias gambling industry.

edit: Picture of drone in question https://twitter.com/jmscaronte/status/1426514097617752066

kelseyfrog2• 3 years ago

I don't understand. There's obviously a market for it. Can't folks decide that the price is too high? Are we really willing to accept that agents aren't rational? Wouldn't that have severe implications for other markets?

anon291• 3 years ago

Agents are not rational. That's why we have substantial oversight of many markets. Like it or hate it... That's what we got.

sarchertech2• 3 years ago

Are we really willing to accept that agents aren't rational? Wouldn't that have severe implications for other markets?

Is this a serious question? Of course we are—gambling has historically been regulated or outright illegal in cultures the world over.

woooooo• 3 years ago

I'm assuming it's satire, but just in case, there's a whole body of economics built around recognizing market participant irrationality and trying to cope with it given Econ 101 assumptions.

contravariant• 3 years ago

If you don't accept that people are irrational at this point then you're not being very rational yourself.

And indeed any market that relies on people acting rationally suffers the same problem, even if people keep insisting otherwise.

xbar• 3 years ago

How does addiction operate in other markets?

SonicScrub• 3 years ago

There is absolutely no reason to be unregulated free-market absolutists about addictive behaviors, other than blind ideology. Regulations on gambling and gambling advertisements have been around for a long time because we know that people do not act rationally when it comes to this activity. This is not dissimilar to how legalized drugs like tobacco are treated.

The question for society to answer is "is the social costs of gambling addiction (which don't remain localized to the gambler themself) worth what we gain from unrestricted advertising?". I personally would say "hell no". Likewise with drugs, let's not eliminate legal methods. That just forces it underground. But that doesn't mean it should be promoted, or plastered all over billboards, arenas, and stadiums.

fardo• 3 years ago

Can't folks decide that the price is too high?

If you look at drug addicts as a group, the answer is often a direct and emphatic “no, they can’t” - the drug alters the way they perform that price calculus such that many of them will spend their last dollar, go deeply in debt, and do terrible things to continually chase a high. Drug policy has had many failures in the US, but there does seem to be a correct nugget of recognition that “some drugs seem to be fundamentally destructive to those that get addicted, and to the broader society that has to deal with the consequences of those who are addicted”.

Gambling in many people seems to have the same effect on altering price calculus in a way similar to addictive drugs, which at leasts motivates a reasonable discussion whether benefits of allowing it exceed the harms it causes those individuals and society.

cf12412908415• 3 years ago

If you look at drug addicts as a group,

What makes you think you arent just looking at the extremly visible dysfunction subgroup? How many cocaine consuming banksters do you know and what does that say about the completeness of your perspective? I think there is a good argument to be made that you are over generalizing from a stereotype.

cf12412908415• 3 years ago

That simplification seems counterproductive. There is obviously a spectrum of rationality that gets compromised by addiction. Be it heroin, alcohol, sugar or gambling.

There was a social engineering talk a while back that i cant find anyone where some sysadmin explained that just informing users they wanted to do something stupid was far more beneficial then just blocking their attempts.

Most of these addiction industries are profitable through addicts, the amount of cheap hard liquor bought by non-addicts is neglect able. Maybe just communicating with these people is far more sensible then banning something that people can also consume reasonably. Maybe somebody that spend his last 3 months rent on gambling wants to talk about how to not do that. While the notice on every visit is quite annoying.

Even if you cant let go of the demand for judicial intrusion altogether, maybe start with something like a one week detox after x months of behavior typical for an addict that lost control. It would likely get a lot of people over the diet hump they have been battling for years and sobering up long enough to reevaluate your life choices might not be the worst thing to do.

WarOnPrivacy2• 3 years ago

A few generations ago, both gambling and psychedelics were considered so detrimental to society that they carried harsh penalties.

Then one them started firehosing cash into campaigns and budgets. . .

Fuzzwah3• 3 years ago

Tangential comment, I'm a passionate follower of formula one and have realised that basically anything advertised on F1 cars is "bad". Cigarettes are the obvious historical example, FTX is the more recent one.

There's many that are socially acceptable at the moment but only with the caveat of either "in moderation" or "for responsible adults": energy drinks, crypto, etc.

Google Chrome is one that a decent debate could be had about.

Microsoft Dynamics might be the exception that proves the rule... But I've never worked out what the hell the product actually is.

sianemo• 3 years ago

Dynamics is Microsoft (somewhat poorly) making a Salesforce for people who are all-in on the Microsoft ecosystem. In terms of collective human suffering caused per year of existence I would say it's on par with the rest of the stuff you've mentioned.

nickpeterson• 3 years ago

That’s uncalled for, people temporarily enjoy drinking and smoking, nobody temporarily enjoys microsoft dynamics.

Fuzzwah3• 3 years ago

I made this comment purely from my impressions of the team's major sponsors and the ones that I've noticed. Realising that I'm rather advertising blind these days (like all of us, I figure), I thought I should actually dig up a list and have more of a think about this idea.

https://formularapida.net/f1-2023-list-of-partners-sponsors-...

Safe to say, my comment above is hyperbole. Still, I wonder how many of the companies in the linked list will be considered "bad" in 10+ years.

WarOnPrivacy2• 3 years ago

In the mid-90s, a local dial-up ISP sent their support calls to me. I once put a local retiree couple online and went on my way. About 6 months later I came back to fix their connection which he promptly tested at a gambling site.

I also did service calls at their friends and neighbors. They said that since getting online he'd gambled away their retirement, maxed out their credit cards, got new cards & maxed those, took out a 2nd mortgage and gambled that off. That they'd lose the house was a certainty. The wife may not have known yet just how bad off they were.

I don't have a more depressing tech story.

totallywrong• 3 years ago

It's ridiculous these days watching any sports content, the amount of betting related ads is outrageous. I see no other outcome than droves of new gambling addicts.

cameldrv• 3 years ago

I don't know how we went from "you have to travel to Las Vegas or Atlantic City to gamble" to "You can gamble 24/7 on a device that's always with you." Anti-gambling laws were put in place for very well understood reasons.

paulryanrogers• 3 years ago

Relentless petitions, one state at a time. I'll never forget the door to door and being approached in parking lots to sign petitions to get legal gambling on the ballot.

000ooo000• 3 years ago

Only slightly related: can anyone speak to the syntax of headlines like this where the 'author' of statement is appended to the end? e.g. Statment: author. It seems to go against what seems to me more natural and common, which is 'author: statement', or even 'statement - author'. Just curious is all.

starwin1159• 3 years ago

I know a friend Running an illegal online casino in Hong Kong

(In Hong Kong you can only bet on Jockey Club organizations)

He continued to sell ads on Facebook during the epidemic.

He earns over one million dollars every month.

And he is just one of them. There are many people who make more.

It really opened my eyes.

Sorry, my native language is not English.

Young men face high risk for gambling addiction as sports betting surges:experts

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