This is missing the fact that there's a temporal element to this. Over time, the corpus grows larger and larger meaning younger actors and actresses find connections easier through common ancestors.
There are a number of things that cycle because the solution ends up being successful enough that the next generation doesn't realize there is a problem being solved. Chesterton's Fence, except on a generational timescale it's Chesterton's Oscillating Fence.
100% squashing gambling has generally not been successful, but the strategy of fencing it away from most of society and keeping it in a set of defined places that require people to actively seek it out has been successful enough that people forget why we don't allow gambling in every convenience store in the country. I'd say the additional "convenience" of having it in your pocket all the time is a new nuance, but doesn't necessarily change the fundamental equations.
We will relearn. Our grandchildren will forget again. (Unless things have really changed.)
Lottery tickets at least avoid the worst aspects of the real time feedback that things like slot machines can give. Though scratchoffs certainly get closer.
I do hold out some hope that in this pendulum swing we can land at least for a while on banning state sponsored gambling, though. It'll come back. Too appealing to keep down forever, unfortunately. I like to say it's a good exercise to sit down and really think about the difference between "organized crime" and a "government" but when a "government" does things like zealous defense of its gambling monopoly it does rather weaken the distinction....
I can't shake sonething I read in one of Terry Pratchett's books. In it, a character convinces a barbarian horde that it is a bad idea to descend on farmers, kill them all, and take their belongings. It is better to keep them alive, and collect 30% of their belongings each year perpetually. The connection between politics and crime is very close.
If they actually operated in a disinterested way, sure, but how many different forms of advertising do you see the lotto being promoted in? Doesn't seem disinterested to me.
What? States make buckets of money from gambling. They typically claimed it was "for education" but money is fungible and our other taxes never went down, so anything it offsets in one budget just leaves more money for other budgets.
I read your second sentence but I don't get it. Isn't generating profit for the state literally the entire point of the lottery? Who is arguing that it doesn't do that in theory or practice?
Ditto, this is a cancer. Wayne Gretzky is dead to me because of his support of these ads. The greatest Canadian athlete of the 80s and 90s is now Bret "The Hitman" Hart.
On a more depressing note, wasn't this always a thing? I remember being in 4th grade when a classmate brought in something called "Mise-o-jou", which was being run by the Quebec government.
While sports betting was allowed, in the past I don't think it was allowed to be advertised beyond like lottery displays. You would not see ads during Hockey Night in Canada for it either on the boards or during breaks. Now they are all over and run by third parties.
I am from Montreal and (I can't believe this but it is 100% true) I was bullied in my (English-speaking) Montreal-area grade school for wearing non-Oilers merch. I was pleased when he left. (Yes, this is the home of Rocket Richard, the Pocket Rocket, Jean Beliveau, Guy Lafleur and Patrick Roy at the time)
I think the online element hates Gretzky because of something about the order of Canada but that does nothing to me and I honestly don't care. However, the gambling ads literally damage the fabric of the country and ruin the lives of average people, for a guy who made more in an year than many people made in a lifetime.
Tangentially related, but I'm curious. How does bilingualism in Montreal work out in practice? I know most of the rest of Quebec is very Francophone, but Montreal is more bilingual.
I've seen some interesting jobs pop up in Montreal and I'm starting to take French classes with the intent to possibly move there, but I'm not clear how much there's still the option to work in English in the city.
Sorry if it's a silly question, I'm Canadian by descent but have never lived in Canada, so I'm out of the loop on a lot of stuff.
I'm not the best person to ask, but the last I heard, New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province. The rest are either French or English only. (It was a news story when the premier of Manitoba spoke in French in his legislature a few weeks back).
That said, I live in Alberta now and normal serious parents tend to send their kids to French immersion. It's a leg up if you are going to get a government job, and it is pretty cool. That's not to say that John Q. Public is going to be happy if you are going to talk to him in French, but I think with the explosion of other languages in Alberta, the regressive types now are probably more accepting of it than they were before.
> That said, I live in Alberta now and normal serious parents tend to send their kids to French immersion.
Not really true, there is usually a very limited number of seats in french immersion. In the school district where I live, its a lottery system of who gets to go into french immersion as there are limited seats. Also you're implying that parents are not doing a good job if they don't send their kids to french immersion which is patently false.
> It's a leg up if you are going to get a government job, and it is pretty cool
In certain positions in the federal government, possibly. I know lots of people who work in provincial governments that don't know any french, and have never been required to know any.
The ostensible reason provided (at least according to press reports at the time) was to divert people from offshore gambling operations, allowing the government to capture revenue as well as protect consumers. That argument isn't entirely without merit either. The US supreme court legalized sports gambling in 2018, so there was going to be a tsunami of people using VPNs to gamble without legalization in Canada.
Provincial governments are way too happy with sin taxes in general, to the point of encouraging the vices they supposedly want to reduce.
The entire concept of sin taxes distorts the incentives for govs too much. If something is to be discouraged then do that, but do not have government revenue attached to people performing the discouraged activity.
This is a bandaid at best though. At some point we need to start having discussions on how to let the self destructive people self remove themselves from society.
Actually, to my surprise, it was nearly every party that tried to get similar legislation passed, and eventually it got nearly unanimous favour, which I find a little sad.
If you pass legislation without due diligence regarding constraining a now legal activity, then it is effectively an act of support for advertising it. In this case, nearly all members of all political parties supported legalizing it, and then passed it off to the provinces and washed their hands of it until now
I was going to upvote this comment but changed my mind because I think although we both see gambling ads as a scourge, we could not be more far apart in our reasons.
I could give two shits about the "public health crisis". People have agency, they can choose what to do with their lives and their money and I'm okay with the reaping and sowing lining up together.
I'm concerned in that I find the focus on gambling presented so prominently to be offensive, period. That is, I am offended. This is Just Wrong. I enjoy watching (some) sports, I appreciate the drama, I love the moments of superhuman feats and the balance of luck and skill and strategy and tactics and grand strategy and analysis and all of the things that it presents.
A friendly wager is fine, going by a sports book is fine once in a while. Even betting on an outcome on an online sports book is fine. It is a vice, sure, but who among us does not enjoy stepping outside the bounds of "proper" behavior. But this pervasive push to treat it as a normal and expected and typical thing offends me. It is a vice, and it should be done with the appropriate amount of shame and friction that we tolerate of almost all vices. It should not be normalized and it should not be glorified.
>Every AI model has the same “controversial” take on humans
You have far less agency than you think you do. We are automatons in so much of our behavior. You do what your parents tell you, your parents do what the church tells them, and you all buy ice cold Coca-Cola because the TV tells you to. In bulk we are statistically predictable. This is why we have laws against particular drugs, huge numbers of us will high ourselves to death and collapse the society around us. Society itself is a remover of agency. Animals can do whatever they want, humans are constrained socially in what we're allowed to do.
I guess it's possible, but you have no idea how much agency I think I have.
To focus on one example you give, "Society itself is a removed of agency. Animals can do whatever they want, humans are constrained socially in what we're allowed to do." -- this is a clear misunderstanding of what agency is, or at least how I am using it. You CAN do anything you are physically capable of doing, even in violation of society's rules. Complete agency! People desire things that are only obtainable through conformance with society's rules, or, more sociopathically, only obtainable through the appearance of conformance with society's rules. That society survives is in effect dependent on this fragile web of incentives and expectations and social consequences and martial consequences
You can choose not to drink Coke! That people statistically choose to drink Coke does not mean that people lack agency. If you think the reason people drink Coke is because TV tells you to, then I encourage you to create your own beverage and advertise the shit out it and then get super rich!
The problem is that there is a feeling that you have written out here: that manipulation of people's desires is somehow mechanistic or predictable.
That you can follow some script and get people to do something. But it only appears that way because you are looking at the survivors of the vicious evolution, red in tooth and branding. All the ads in the world didn't make Crystal Pepsi a winner (or frankly make Pepsi a winner). The combination of factors that makes one thing successful and another not cannot be easily replicated or copied from one domain to another or even within one domain.
If there were a mechanism then someone would be using it; everyone would be using it; and there would be no winners and everyone would be a winner. It's a self-contradictory view that doesn't match reality in any way.
> I could give two shits about the "public health crisis". People have agency, they can choose what to do with their lives and their money and I'm okay with the reaping and sowing lining up together.
"I could give two shits about the "public health crisis".
Have you thought about this for longer than a fraction of a second? Hope you don't bother to use any of our public education, health care, or other support systems.
Addiction to drugs, alcohol, and gambling is expensive for all of us in Canada.
Drugs and alcohol, for sure, I can see it. They are a disproportionate drain on the public health apparatus compared to individuals that live a healthy lifestyle. Use of drugs, alcohol, driving motorcycles, eating too much fatty food, participating in dangerous sports, all have a public health components.
I'm not seeing it for gambling. How is that expensive for anyone but the person doing the gambling?
When it comes to hard drugs I can understand why there are reasonable arguments for legalization of personal use.
Idk how many reasonable arguments extend the overton window to thinking that meth should be advertised seemingly all over the place. Because gambling ads are actually everywhere.
I was addicted to hard drugs. When in therapy I've met people there for gambling addiction. The takeout lesson was that for some people it is basically the same as stimulants. They had the same issues, fucked up their lives just as much.
I was about to ask the GP why is this a ‘public health crisis’, so appreciative of your preemptive response a little scroll down.
I still don’t like calling personal self-inflicted non-chemical things a ‘public health crisis’ because it seems open to so many other things…. But if we ignore the terminology, we’d probably agree about the reality of it being a problem anyway. The lure of pointless semantic arguments is a public discourse crisis.
Modern sports gambling ads amount to fraud because winners are prevented from winning more through wager restrictions. The whole industry can only exist because it cheats and lies.
The most damning thing about the online gambling sites/apps is that they don't care about how much you bet, only how much you lose. They aggressively limit and ban their biggest customers if those customers win.
No. They are called "vices" because you get stuck in them. Ten thousand studies on mice tell us that addiction isn't learned morality but innate biology.
We also pass laws regulating murder/arson/theft even though those too can be avoided through self control.
I wonder if they fixed it, or if it depends on the game type. In Versus mode, I got 10/10, Jev got 7/10, but the points were closer: 1201 to 1034 so I assume time is also part of the calculation. One of mine was 9.6 seconds vs 0.3 seconds. It wasn't always clear where you were supposed to click, like on a graph, the choices were buttons at the bottom of the screen.
Its a combination of time and correct/wrong answer. But the game had not been played by these many people before so it can be that the scoring mechanism is not fully calibrated. Thanks for trying it out!
I've been bootstrapping for two years now, just me and AI tooling.
Code moves much faster, product taste doesn't. Once you have your marching orders you can make features 10x faster. Shots off target still miss though. It doesn't matter if your code gets generated 10x faster when it doesn't resonate with users.
"This" is lazy but yes, this. Especially in the app space, 90% of the stuff coming out has barely any "do people who aren't me actually need this, does this deliver something new and useful" thought put into it. It's a skill most people lack, they can't judge it.
Bootstrapping a solo software business has multiple core required skills. Technical skills are now largely unnecessary, but it turns out most people lack multiple of the other required skills too.
Technical skills are very much still required to take the product into maturity. Coding a prototype is very different from building something actually polished enough to generate value.
If you have a logo in the top left corner of your company blog the logo should route to the home page so I can see what product you're actually building.
> In 2024, Ontarians wagered $82.7 billion CAD on these sites through 2.6 million player accounts.
Truly astounding numbers. Without a doubt, online gambling is the most preventable public health crisis of our generation. None of this had any business getting legalized.
Important context that many of these dollars are counted multiple times.
Ex: you bet 100 and win, bringing your holdings to 200. You bet another 100 and lose, back to 100. You’ve gambled $200 but have arrived at the same number you started with.
I have friends who gamble in excess of 100k/yr total. In general their net is ± 3k. A lot to spend on a hobby, but the total is often misleading.
I was just coming to say the prediction markets are probably way, way worse for society; sports or otherwise. For one thing, they'll be around a trillion dollar market in a few years[1]. How is that in any way a good thing? For another, every bettor on a prediction market is incentivized to use insider information at best, or even to influence the outcome at worst. This is a low point of civilization.
That figure seemed way off to me (gut response) so I did a tiny bit of digging: Ontario claims income (primary household income) for 2024 was $791B. ~10% isn't as shocking as I expected.
Wagering 10% of your household income is not shocking?? What would it take to shock you? That is an astounding amount.
Most people are living paycheck to paycheck. I've watched gambling destroy more than one family member's lives.
To put this number in context: estimate 1/3 of income for rent, so this is 1/3 of their rent?! Translating that to my own rent is an amount that would immediately lead me to quit forever.
It's both better and worse than it seems. I'm guessing something like 50% of folks gamble $0. Then another 45% gamble some amount of their income, averaging 10%. Finally 5% will gamble everything they have and send their family careening into poverty.
By transaction volume yes. Presumably it’s not all spending though, if you regularly win back some of that money. The same dollar is probably wagered multiple times before it is lost.
Ontario lotteries pay out about 58 cents per dollar in, so that's still $13,000 annually out-of-pocket for a total spend of $31,000. That's crazy money.
Sportsbooks typically pay back more like 90%, brick and mortar casinos 90%-99% depending on the game. I don't know what Ontario mandates for regulated online casinos, but I'd guess they're at the high end of that and focus on volume, return custom and dark patterns rather than extreme house edge.
If it's 98%, the average household loses 0.2% of their income gambling.
It also could be inflated due to winnings being put back into another bet. A single dollar could be accounted for multiple times if used in multiple bets.
Not that I am saying that this number is ok, gambling is a net negative on any society.
I’ve traded over a million dollars of equity volume this year but my brokerage account has less than $50,000 in it. You can wager the same dollar more than once.
The gross amount doesn't tell you how much money is being lost to gambling. I'm not going to soften that wording, it really is lost, but such a shocking gross amount means the average loss is in the thousands per year. Gambling is also the archetypal whale hunt. Your best customers are harmed most by your product.
There's nothing else that delivers that level of harm directly to a device in your pocket.
It's a long tail. The vast majority make $20 parlay wagers here and there and they're the real cash cow. And then there are the degens that make $2,000, or $5,000 wagers on everything because otherwise "what's the point?".
Short of outright banning (which I would favor), we can at least make mobile wagers capped at say $100 and the same account can't wager more that $500 within a 24 hour period.
That would allow people to have their fun but seriously limit the blast radius when they inevitably lose big repeatedly.
> The vast majority make $20 parlay wagers here and there and they're the real cash cow.
You got the meaning of "whale" wrong. The majority of the winnings / losings come from the "long tail" addicts.
> And then there are the degens that make $2,000, or $5,000 wagers on everything because [they are addicted]
I think my edit more accurately reflects what is going on.
You need to put more time into the proposal if you want to make it serious. How long would it take for people to learn they need "alt accounts" to gamble?
Suggestions:
1. Ban advertising of gambling.
2. Ban "remote" gambling including phone apps.
What would it take to make progress on this in the current regulatory environment? Post a link to someone who has thought about it.
So gambling will be limited to anyone with AnyDesk?
> What would it take to make progress on this in the current regulatory environment?
Banning cryptocurrency as a concept,
banning fantasy sports betting (shown as credits, settled in dollars in person or out-of-band),
banning Tor,
I could go on.
But the real lever would be to make it illegal! Which, it was, in many jurisdictions. Now it’s splashed all over every NFL broadcast, as you alluded to with your advertising portion.
Basically printing money just like tobacco companies used to be (and now are again with smokeless products). I'm not generally in favor of morality police laws, but this is so egregious it's beyond morality to me- it's vulnerable peoples' firmware getting exploited to give predatory actors their money.
Should probably mention this as a root comment, but various local image gen models like fooocus [1] run on basically any remotely modern hardware, have phenomenal output quality, and cost basically nothing.
I think companies trying to sell image gen at this point are just banking on ignorance.
reply