I support the legalization of gambling, but you’re wrong. By analogy, that’s like saying only people who don’t understand the risk of unprotected sex have unprotected sex.
I would describe every single one of these as active risk management - and the difference between one sort of active risk management and another is vibes, not reality. There’s an implied moral judgment here that gambling is inherently bad.
I don’t think gambling is inherently immoral; I think mismanaging risk (in either direction) is one of the ways people mess themselves up and therefore encouraging people to take bad risks is immoral. This is not quite the same thing, though it’s close - but the difference between these two positions is what led to prohibition.
Don’t get me wrong, bookies are awful in many ways, but so are bars and crypto exchanges and E*Trade. The right approach in all cases is harm reduction.
I think gambling is harmful similarly to the worst of drugs. I would much rather see cocaine legal than gambling. I just think children are a demographic the least vulnerable as there is always a guardian to put stop to it, they can't lost life saving etc. I am all for limiting gambling (or outright banning many forms of it). I see the whole loot box thing as very low priority though and I think better results can be obtained by education and maybe even slight exposure to the exploitive mechanisms. If anything it's better if a child learn the hard way and lose pocket money than an if an unaware adult gets suckered in and lose their live savings, family, job.
Well, one causes harm and the other doesn't, so they are different situations.
But, in the case of gambling it seems like there is some middle ground. You shouldn't permit companies to program kids to gamble through videogame mechanics for example, and companies should have some regulations bc otherwise it goes from predatory to extremely predatory, but doesn't seem like it should be illegal.
Unfortunately it's a tough thing and hard to even have a conversation about.
I enjoyed the article, but I'm not entirely convinced online gambling can be so easily lumped into the moral panic category with the rest. Unless it's gotten to the point where the games are tightly regulated for fairness and controlled for access to make sure only adults are playing.
On the other hand, I guess video game items having real world value already allows young adults to test these waters somewhat. Just seems that when actual money is involved you're moving beyond simply playing a video game. Or I'm old and panicking morally.
> Yes, as humans have to determine the truth in all things they engage with themselves. Religion, association, food, work, investment... we leave the risk assessment to the person whose money is on the line.
Except when we don't, because it doesn't scale. Attacker vs. Defender problem. A big chunk of regulation - like the parts that define what is fraud, or ones concerned with product safety - are a recognition of the fact that people cannot, in practice, assess trustworthiness of things they engage themselves in. They'd spend all their time doing only that, and never achieving anything. Society needs high level of baseline trust to be maintained just to function.
> And yet we allow it, because they risk no one but themselves.
We actually limit it strongly, precisely because it hurts a lot of people other than the players. Gambling addiction is a problem whose main victims are the families of the addicted. It's a type of problem similar to alcoholism - its spread destroys communities and increases poverty. And so games of chance are a highly regulated space.
> Feel free to exploit young underdeveloped brains to addict them to gambling for profit
Games are designed to keep you interested and engaged-- that's just what a game is. Children's games have included gambling since toys have existed (dreidel, jacks, marbles, to name a few). Children learn about the real world through play, and gambling is a part of that. Risks give benefits or consequences that are often unpredictable. I don't see the explicit benefit of excluding these gambles from children's games.
> Regulation does not exist to prevent people from taking risks. It exist to prevent people from buying something with a risk profile that they do not understand.
I agree, but I think the difficult question here is determining when somebody understands a risk profile.
If a person, at some rational level, understands that a casino is a zero-sum game, that their real return will rapidly approach the expected return of zero the more often you bet etc., but at the same time has a pathological gambling problem, should they still be allowed to play?
> The risk is first order and easily understandable by retail investor. At least as much as going to a casino.
Casinos are heavily regulated in some jurisdictions for precisely these reasons.
I feel these games are less dangerous than gambling is. It seems to me gambling has a greater ability to suck money out of peoples pockets. It's also the case these games are doing nothing magic the gathering hasn't been doing for decades.
There is zero reason these games should not have 13+ restrictions however. Under 13 and you're too young to play these games. Don't care if this means there's a bit of a double standard.
In many countries gambling regulations go beyond age restrictions and companies evolving in that space have to provide safeguards to prevent certain behaviors. I don't think it's far-fetched to imagine similar regulations for things like social media, at least it's a real possibility that exists before simply banning everything.
It’s why it’s banned in most countries for people under the age of 18
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