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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30410 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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How Colleges and Sports-Betting Companies ‘Caesarized’ Campus Life

The online gambling deals have helped athletic departments recoup some of the revenue they lost during the pandemic. The partnerships bring in extra funds that schools can use to sign marquee coaches and build winning sports teams. Mr. Haller, Michigan State’s athletic director, said in a news release at the time of the Caesars deal that it would provide “significant resources to support the growing needs of each of our varsity programs.”

The partnerships raise questions, however, about whether promoting gambling on campus — especially to people who are at an age when they are vulnerable to developing gambling disorders — fits the mission of higher education.

Some aspects of the deals also appear to violate the gambling industry’s own rules against marketing to underage people. The “Responsible Marketing Code” published by the American Gaming Association, the umbrella group for the industry, says sports betting should not be advertised on college campuses.

promoting gambling to 18 year olds is the latest way in which college sports are distorting the goal of college. at uc boulder, the school gets $30 every time someone downloads an app and makes a bet. the faculty managed to ensure that this money went to the right causes, though:

“We came up with the idea that the money from the referral bonus could actually go toward diversity and inclusion and equity efforts at the university, in particular because a lot of the money in athletics are made from underrepresented minorities,” Mr. Hornstein said. A spokesman for the university’s chancellor, Philip DiStefano, confirmed that some of the money will be used to expand mental health and diversity initiatives.

Twitch streamers are paid on the order of up to 10M/month to stream gambling, apparently - adin ross 40M/month (that's gotta be too high, but the eth transaction is there, so at least 10M/some period), trainwreckstv 360M total (gotta be too high too right?), mizkif offered but declined 10M/year for 15h/month. That money's coming from the viewers, obviously. At least HFT creates liquidity!

I work in the industry and the whole thing is absurd.

Honestly unit economics on actually converting somebody from a non-gambler to a gambler are pretty awful in terms of cost per acquisition versus what a 'fresh' gambler will contribute. Takes a few years to mature.

But unlimited VC funds + not acknowledging a severe Pareto principle + growth metrics being all the rage have led to some very stupid decision making in the space of gambling market. All likely ends in tears, harder regulation and hiked tax rates.

Yeah, makes sense that this is just VC money exploring a possibly new market/trying to establish a dominant position.

Plus, in theory if you get the streamer addicted, you can probably pay them less and less and they'll still play your games on stream.

Plus, in theory if you get the streamer addicted, you can probably pay them less and less and they'll still play your games on stream.

Having negotiated some of these deals, generally they're being paid an absolutely obscene amount of cash but have a minimum turnover requirement/additional payments for hitting certain hourlies.

I can't believe you didn't mention Trainwreckstv, quite possibly the face of Twitch gambling.

I edited it in before you posted this! All secondhand knowledge from twitter though, idk much about twitch. I tried watching twitch a week ago, try to stay vaguely aware of different popular forms of media, and every stream I clicked on was just idle chatter, whether over a video game or just a video stream, don't get it tbh.

For me, I like to channel-hop and I don't mind coming into something in medias res; if I end up on someone else's page from a raid or something and I'm interested in what they're currently doing, I'll probably stick around and follow. It's the stream after that one where you can see what someone's really about.

Forgive student loans so we can give them more loans to gamble on college sports teams so they need a new loan. With sufficiently altruistic accounting, we can feedback loop GDP to infinity, pay ourselves a few trillion (pocket change compared to infinity!) while lecturing the plebes that they only think food and gas cost unpayable abstract numbers because they're bigots.

I want to say this is how Economics 2.0 worked in Accelerando, but I don't think Stross was cynical enough to flesh out the details.

With what?

Gambling for children is the new frontier.

With much of the gambling market having sat at relative stagnation compared to the explosion of other recreational markets through various internet activity, we are finally seeing a proper proliferation of gambling. From kids buying lootboxes through ingame apps, which sits at a similar place as kids buying Pokemon cards. Which, differing from Pokemon cards, devolves into straight up gambling through third party websites. Where there is no definitional difference between third party websites that facilitate the gambling of various video game tokens and actual online slot casinos that accept direct money deposits. You have an entire arc where you can go from child to adult and develop a compulsive gambling addiction.

This is then compounded through video game streaming culture where people are gambling away 'fake' money to promote gambling facilities. Where, through affiliations with streaming sites and gambling sites, they receive money from every aspect of their activity. Be that persons who watch and give money to the stream, or kickbacks from the gambling website for each person that signs up through their affiliate link. The fakeness of the endeavor then reaches glorious heights when sometimes the streamer owns a part in the gambling website they are gambling on and receive better odds at winning. Giving them a perfect opportunity to advertise just have much fun 'can' be had. Outside of that there is also always the incentive for the streamers and gambling facility owners to do dealings under the table.

This isn't some dark corner of the internet, or some little known website run out of Malta where you can play online versions of slot machines at a slightly higher RTP. These are the biggest mainstream titles in one of the biggest entertainment industries in the world. These are made to be addictive to children. Specifically engineered by our fine class of programmers and designers to get them to spend money. To get them hooked on gambling.

I mean, could you imagine, when you were a kid, your parents buying you a toy that came equipped with a functional slot machine? Where you could take a 20 dollar bill, put it into the machine, and potentially receive a new toy? What if, instead of being saddled with the reality of having to make a new toy, the company that owns the toy can just print out a card that you want? But that still costs some money. What if the company can just conjure up a pixel that it displays on a screen? Completely divorced from the burdens of traditional money based gambling, these fantastic designers, psychologists and programmers can create a gambling environment where the only worry is how to most effectively direct children and teenagers into a cycle of gambling addiction.

Gambling for children is the new frontier.

Hardly. Not only have people been gambling forever, but children have been gambling forever. Or at least since Roman times. Moral panics about it are nothing new either.

I think the point there is about the locus of control; kids throwing dice among one another is one thing, but kids putting in their parents' CC info for Fortnite V-Bucks is another thing entirely.

You might as well say moral panics about pornography are nothing new and point me to some concerned mothers group from 1000 BC worrying about a suggestively shaped rock as if that has anything to do with modern trends of porn consumption and their effects.

I relation to the internet, yes, it is a new frontier. I don't know what you would allow to qualify as being a new frontier but to me the explosion of these markets is very new. Back when I was younger there were two places to gamble, sports betting, which was heavily regulated, and a single state regulated slot machine hall. Needless to say, it was only the most dedicated who managed to rack up large losses. Fast forward to today, I know 4 people personally who have each lost, in total, more than half a years' worth of wages or more through betting tokens for some video game.

Maybe you live in Las Vegas and this is nothing new under the sun for you, but this didn't exist where I live until in recent years.

Also, targeted advertisements and brazen promotion of gambling to minors has been officially condoned by corporations like Valve through official Esports partnerships and API access. It has never been easier to develop a gambling addiction as a child.

which sits at a similar place as kids buying Pokemon cards.

Just as a note, as an elder millennial when we actually cared about the cards themselves, we didn't just buy packs - we went to the secondary market at giant nerd swap-meets or online and just got the individual cards we wanted. It was actually a salutary early example on how prices fluctuate with popularity and trend (e.g. card prices could vary wildly week to week based on tournament results and the currently-prevalent game meta) and in balancing cost vs desire.

The existence of the secondary market makes cracking packs more like gambling. You pay $4 for a pack that might have a market value of $1 or $100.

You don't need a secondary market for that. Even if the cards only have collectible or play value, it's still gambling. You pay money for the chance to get what you want.

It's always weird when people excuse gambling schemes targeted at kids by pointing at Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh! booster packs: Those were never okay either.

Yes, but insofar as the kids are interested in playing the game, it makes the gambling much less relevant because now you can just go get the card you want.

The part that makes it a bit more like gambling is that you can't just run off photocopies of the cards and just use the ones you want without paying for them. In official tourneys anyway.

I don't see the gambling. Card X now costs $4, and Card Y now costs $5, and Card Z now costs $10. No need to gamble for them at all; you pick the ones you want and buy them in the quantity you want for set prices.

Buying singles on the secondary market does allow someone to play the game without gambling themselves. But in order for that secondary market to exist, someone has to gamble. The company only sells packs.

But why are you forced to put money into the Pokémon "ecosystem" at all?

You might see the point in that you can ABSOLUTELY play casino games at home for "free" using play money.

Which isn't, then, real gambling.

If you go to a casino/Pokémon tournament, they force you to play with real chips/cards.

Which reinforces the part of the scheme that makes them money.

Unless nintendo changed things dramatically with print on demand or something, you can only pick those cards because they're the payout to someone gambling on the purchase price of the packs.

You alluded to this in your last paragraph, but I want to stress that Gacha games have penetrated the Western market and are here to stay barring legislative changes. If you aren't familiar with the term, it refers to a type of game that requires players to roll some kind of slot machine to unlock items or characters that they use to play the game. The games are almost always free and allow progression with ingame currency that can be unlocked with time, but the credit card allows for much faster progression and the games are designed to get you to pay. This is often done by throttling progression once a player has invested time but not money. Some games are "better" than others with regards to this, but playing them is on some level adversarial as the developers wage psychological warfare against you in an attempt to get more of your money.

The main incentive to spend money is to unlock new characters. Many Gachas are built off existing IPs with lots of characters and a built-in fanbase, like Fire Emblem or Fate. Newer characters are typically mechanically better to encourage a treadmill of spending and unlocking, but I would say power is probably only half the reason people will try to whale (Gacha term for spending a lot of money) for a character. A large part of the draw is feeding on the emotional attachment a player has to a specific character, whether through waifuism or some other draw. This is also the reason so much Gacha art is highly sexualized.

If you haven't heard of Genshin Impact, it is a Chinese Gacha game with stunningly gorgeous visuals, music, and character designs. To say it is huge is an understatement. It has generated almost 4 billion in revenue on mobile platforms alone since its release in late 2020 — keep in mind this is not including numbers for Playstation or PC. Beyond the money, it's hard to overstate how big this game is right now. It boasts about 60 million+ active monthly players, and the player demographics are also not what one might immediately assume for the genre. In the West, 45% of the players are women, and many of them are young.

Anecdotally, at the last few conventions I've attended, I would say about half the teens and 20-somethings were dressed up as characters from the game, with the next-most popular IP being Demon Slayer. Trends come and go obviously; 10 years ago those same people would be painting their skin gray and wearing orange horns. But it's worth mentioning to illustrate the game's relevance. It's probably China's first true cultural export in the modern age. It also puts to shame the deliberate ugliness in many of our local cultural products.

It's worth talking about Genshin because the game is both an outlier and a portent of things to come. The Gacha genre has a (deserved) reputation for being cheap, tacky cash-ins of existing IPs with little artistic vision or compelling gameplay. Genshin Impact is none of those things. It is clearly a labor of love and has inspired huge swaths of people to get into its story and world, create art and fanworks, and dress up as the characters. In terms of artistic vision, it really puts most of the Western AAA scene to shame. And other companies will be taking notes.

The format is here to stay, and you will see more of the design principles exported to more Western games, whose developers are hungry for new ways to monetize. The Western AAA market has been aggressively pushing monetization for years in the form of money-based upgrades, cosmetic lootboxes,and season passes (the current dominant scheme). Why let your customer pay $60 once if you're going to go through the trouble of developing a game? Why do that when you can make so much more money? The troubled release of Cyberpunk 2077 was likely the last gasp of the old ways for AAA. Games as a live service and money-based progression are here to stay.

So it goes. It's a shame that a game like Genshin Impact can seemingly only be made nowadays using these monetization practices. I have a disposition towards addiction, and my way of managing it is to not allow predatory temptations to enter my environment. Having to treat an increasing number of video games the way I treat alcohol is certainly interesting. There's an argument that modern development costs are so high that you need to fund games this way, but I don't see how that sausage is made so I can only speculate whether this is true or not. For games with ultramodern graphics, this may be the case, but if you're willing to look past that, the AA and Indie game scene is much less myopic. Our local Rimworld dev-turned fearless leader can attest to this.

It's probably China's first true cultural export in the modern age.

I dunno if I'd say that (wouldn't The Three-Body Problem count?); even within just the realm of Chinese gacha games specifically, Girls' Frontline and Arknights came first. Definitely the biggest, though.

Azur Lane was Chinese too, right? Not the most prestigious cultural export, but they conquered the USS Iowa when the Japanese couldn't.

Huh, I thought Kantai Collection (the Japanese ship-girl game) had the biggest claim (or at least the first) to ship-girl-ing the Iowa, but I guess Azur Lane went a step further. But yes, AL also came before.

45% of Genshin players are women? It's a very pretty game but that's a lot!

Is that why all the men are so feminine? Take Venti, Kaeya or Aether - not exactly pillars of masculinity. Their names don't even sound too manly. Venti is something you'd buy at Starbucks. Most look like they could pass as women. I know China has an artistic preference towards feminine-looking males with long hair in their fantasy scenarios but it's still a bit suspicious. A big part of the male fanbase is enticed by the pretty women - see Genshin's prevalence on danbooru. Maybe the women like the pretty boys?

https://genshin-impact.fandom.com/wiki/Character/List

deleted

Zorba at least had some involvement in Rimworld, no idea to what extent. But he did have an excellent story about the psychology of game design from his work on the game. I wish I had the link, but alas I don't.

This?

Not what I was thinking of, though that is interesting (I don't think I read it before). Basically the story I remember Zorba telling was this:

At one point in the development of Rimworld, sun lamps were on 24h a day despite the fact that plants can't actually grow at night. That annoyed players, who felt it was silly for the game to charge them power around the clock for sun lamps that weren't even having an effect for half the day. But what the players didn't know, is that was a deliberate design decision - sun lamps were intended to suck down power as a cost for how useful it is to be able to grow plants inside a mountain or whatever. So, in the end, they wound up making sun lamps shut off at night but doubled the power cost during the day. Same game result (arguably even more punishing for the player since they needed to have higher peak power), and the players were much happier with it.

Ah, yeah, that was pretty good. Link is at here.

Yeah, that's the one. Thanks for the link!

Reminds me of the WoW example. In the beginning of world of warcraft there was a system to penalize people who played too often and incentivize logging off. After gaining a certain amount of experience in a session you'd get a 50% experience penalty. Players hated it and rebelled. Blizzard's response was to half player experience but give a "rested" bonus doubling player experience for the a certain amount of a experience. Essentially the same system. Players loved it.

Yeah, that's another great example of the same phenomenon. If memory serves that came up in whatever thread Zorba shared the Rimworld story, as well.

A large part of the draw is feeding on the emotional attachment a player has to a specific character, whether through waifuism or some other draw. This is also the reason so much Gacha art is highly sexualized.

This is where these things actually start to scare me, as they're combining multiple pleasurable stimuli into a reward and using intermittent reinforcement to leverage whatever particular addictive tendency the user has to get them to keep playing and spending money. You like cute girls? You like huge breasts? You like emotional vulnerability? Or just like to see number go up? We guarantee there's a superstimulus tailored for YOU in here!

If they were able to occasionally dispense a sweet, tasty snack as a reward then they'd be about one step shy of just having a button that directly releases dopamine in the subject's brain.

Now...

Add in the capability to use AI to generate infinite lewd/sexualized images specified to the individual user's tastes.

Yep. That's why the only winning move is to not play, IMO. Willpower is a finite resource, while entire industries of highly-paid optimizers are working full-time to break it with their products. Limiting your vectors of exposure is the best way to live a life free of negative drains, but this is becoming increasingly difficult as more and more things become gamified services. This involves more than just Gacha, but that industry is where it's really easy to see the psychological tricks laid bare.

That's why the only winning move is to not play, IMO. Limiting your vectors of exposure is the best way to live a life free of negative drains.

This is the solution I'm adopting, to be sure. There's a huge 'Camels Nose in the Tent' element, however.

This really slammed home for me approximately 1 year ago when I went and played Blackjack at a casino for the first time.

I was 'smart' in that I placed a hard limit on the amount of money I was willing to bet, total, and when I won that amount I immediately 'banked' it so I couldn't actually lose money anymore. Of course, they have ATMs INSIDE the Casino so you don't have to be limited to merely the cash on hand.

At one point I was up, I think, by like $5,000. I ended the session up by about $400.

And for weeks afterwards I couldn't completely shake the desire to go back and keep playing. Thankfully it would have been a couple hours drive and so it wasn't something I could just easily do on a whim.

But holy cow just a couple hours of play gave me such a rush that I was still thinking about it weeks after the fact. Something I had never actually done for the vast majority of my life. I don't even think losing my virginity had that kind of mental staying power.

Yeah, we live in a world where everything is attempting to exploit your psychology and the proliferation of convenient ways to spend money means there's virtually no friction to slow your descent into any particular hole of addiction.

I could wax/rant on the topic of how easy it is to put money INTO various systems but the said systems are very reluctant to send money back, but on the topic of gambling in particular I think we're going down a very, very dangerous path if we don't erect more serious barriers to entry. I don't know how to achieve that, however.

The phenomenon you're describing is basically just Beginner's Luck. As ridiculous as it sounds, Beginners Luck is real. Think about it—say you've never gambled before but go to the casino when one of your friends suggests it would make a fun night out. And say you spend the entire evening slowly losing $400. You're probably going to think that gambling is the stupidest thing on earth and the next time your friends want to hang out you'll probably suggest going bowling instead. This isn't to say you're never going to gamble again, but since your first experience with it was a hard slap in the face you're probably going to be more circumspect about the whole enterprise. Now suppose on the other hand that your first experience is similar to the one you described. Now gambling seems like an easy, thrilling way to make money. Sure, you eventually lost a ton, but you know what it's like to be up 5 grand and that it's possible, in a non-theoretical way, to earn a month's salary in a matter of hours. Now you've got a dragon to chase.

I think we're going down a very, very dangerous path if we don't erect more serious barriers to entry. I don't know how to achieve that, however.

I think a good first step would be limiting gambling to actual casinos or other physical places. I know that for actual degenerate gamblers this probably won't make much of a difference, but there's something particularly scummy about being able to play slot machines any time, anywhere. The closest casino to me is 20–25 minutes away from my house, and if I wanted to gamble I'd at least have to find time to make the drive down there. It seems fundamentally different than being able to just lie in bed and play slots.

Sure, you eventually lost a ton, but you know what it's like to be up 5 grand and that it's possible, in a non-theoretical way, to earn a month's salary in a matter of hours. Now you've got a dragon to chase.

Bingo.

There was a point at which I realized that I was placing bets on individual hands that was larger than the whole amount I had budgeted for playing. And it was fun. Feeling like a relative high roller, fantasizing about winning enough to, well if not quit my job take a really long, fancy vacation. All while knowing on a fundamental level that I'm playing a game where the odds are deliberately stacked against me so that it isn't rational to expect it to happen. On the other hand, there's probably a few versions of me in different timeline branches who got extremely lucky and were quite happy with the outcome.

I should also point out that I took a brief break between sessions, and when I came back to the table, that's when I lost most of my position, just a string of "bad luck" that contrasted strongly to the winning streak I had been on. So yeah, 'beginners luck' would be the right way to categorize that. And everything about the process is designed to make you feel like you're special and the winning will never end.

I think a good first step would be limiting gambling to actual casinos or other physical places.

I agree... but this sounds impossible to enforce without levels of draconian control of the internet that I am far less comfortable with.

The point I've alluded to is how easy/frictionless it is to transfer money into basically any entity these days.

Perhaps a comparable law could be that in order to play any kind of games that get categorized as 'gambling' you have to physically deposit money with the entity running the game. That is, you must withdraw the amount from your account as cash, physically hold it and carry it to a location, and physically hand it over, vs. simply entering an account number or swiping a card.

This would be almost as good as strictly limiting it to physical locations. And then enforcement can take place at the payment processor level, which STILL has concerns over draconian control, but doesn't require direct surveillance of all users.

I mean, could you imagine, when you were a kid, your parents buying you a toy that came equipped with a functional slot machine?

Yes, except they never used REAL money.

I had a little handheld Yachtzee game that was really fun to play, but it wasn't hooked up to the internet (which was in it's infancy) and thus it couldn't take credit card info or cryptocurrency.

Oh, one Christmas we got a gift that was a just, in fact, a toy slot machine.. Ages 8 and up! Seriously!

Also, video game arcades had plenty of games that were vaguely disguised gambling machines.

Chuck-E-Cheese was just a mini-Vegas for children, in that respect.

Oh Lord, Pokemon Cards. Spend money on a sealed pack of printed paper, but MAYBE one of them would have some shiny foil on it! Same concept.

Where you could take a 20 dollar bill, put it into the machine, and potentially receive a new toy?

Claw machines, basically. Though they usually robbed you one quarter at a time.

Chuck-E-Cheese had been largely games of skill, rather than games of chance.

I was at a Chuck-E-Cheese last month for a children's party, it was still mostly games of skill though there was prize wheel, every spot 'won' something.

I guess we had different experiences growing up. My mom and dad were very adamant that all of this arcade nonsense was just to steal your money and would never give me any if I asked to go play the machines.

Other than that, I don't follow your point.

I'm saying gambling has been a common thing for a while, but both tech and social permissiveness is leading to it being integrated almost everywhere and it can take your money in large amounts now.

I am honestly amazed with how quickly the 'vice' of gambling has seemingly become accepted as a mainstream practice with virtually no pushback from the either main political party, even the one that would presumably see gambling as exploitation of vulnerable populations (I'll let you decide which one that is!).

Seems like for the longest time sports betting was this shady thing you could only do via bookies in Vegas, then seemingly overnight there were DraftKings ads EVERYWHERE.

I'd add on to that all the hype around the Powerball and Poker championships these days.

Oh, add in that Gambling sponsorships and livestreams were becoming so ubiquitous that Twitch had to ban them. Fucking KIDS being advertised at here.

Can't forget that the EU is trying to reign in video game lootboxes, which also have become insanely common. Again. Kids.

ESPECIALLY when you put all this against the backdrop of the Crypto market being called out as just one big complicated casino.

Well, guys, if you're absolutely fine with college students taking on debt to bet on sports teams, you really can't complain if they're taking on debt to bet on magic internet dollars with Shiba Inus or fancy jpegs of apathetic monkeys. The complaint really seems to be that you're not getting a cut of the action.

And, finally, you've got the CFTC refusing to approve prediction markets for elections, for completely opaque reasons. Plenty of approved markets for literal natural disasters but something as important as an election vote count? NOPE.

All in all, a very confusing environment regarding what is gambling and what isn't gambling, and which types of gambling are legitimate and accepted and which are, I guess, sneered at and relegated to seedier venues.

ESPECIALLY when you put all this against the backdrop of the Crypto market being called out as just one big complicated casino.

Bring evidence in proportion to the inflammatory nature of your comments. crypto contains multitudes.

sports betting

To be fair, i don't think betting should be considered gambling at all.

The outcomes are not random. You can predict them if your model is good enough. It is playing with money but the core sentiment among is practitioners is either putting their money where their mouth is or trying to come up with the best model for something with an artificial risk/reward mechanism. With your eyes squinted enough you can make the case that trading certain financial contracts are no different.

Basically I do think there is some overlap in the demographic that pours their life savings down the roulette table and those who bet it all on a team. But that overlap is small.

Eh.

You're assuming a fair marketplace. Bookies happily throw out/massively cut the betsizes of anybody who's even somewhat likely to win, and unless you're just rorting promos (which is actually pretty easy and free money as long as they last), sports betting markets are pretty damned efficient.

In a perfect world where bookies had to take 'sharp' action, I think this'd be a fairer take, but then again sharp action is so rare that most people aren't even cognizant that limiting is a thing.

Anything is gambling if your model is poor enough.

And entities like DraftKings are only profitable if people's models are poor enough that they'll take some illl-advised bets.

The only thing that really separates casino games from financial markets are the fact that casinos control the rules so the house always wins whilst in the financial markets in theory this isn't the case.

Which does make the financial markets even wilder than casinos since in the casino you (probably) won't see the roulette wheel spontaneously explode and kill like six people, and the games aren't tied together in such a way that the entire system melts down if one game is compromised.

Does the book actually risk much in a typical sports betting operation? I thought the whole point of floating odds prior to the event was to make as much of the betting effectively pari mutual as possible. If the house always wins because they get 10% of the bet, that's a lot more like the position the exchanges take in financial markets.

Parimutuel only really gets used for horses these days, and even that's being eroded as fixed odds gets switched on. I've worked in the industry for a variety of different operators, in different roles, and generally the book's bankroll is so absurdly deep compared to the individual bettor that there's no significant sweats on day-to-day betting.

There's been some cases such as Mayweather-McGregor where there was an infinite supply of McGregor bets at large prices where a hypothetical win would have been very bad for the industry, but that's atypical. Trump-Biden was also another one of those down here in Australia where books had a sufficient potential liability on Trump they were literally encouraging arbitrage.

books had a sufficient potential liability on Trump they were literally encouraging arbitrage

What does "encouraging arbitrage" mean here?

Certain operators had a 8-figure liability on Trump so they pushed their price on Biden high enough that users could lock-in a small guaranteed profit by betting Biden with them and Trump on competitors.

I assume that means "scoop up the other bet for stupid cheap and potentially get a stupid-high return," but I'm only more familiar with the typical economics definition of "arbitrage."

I'm not even familiar with that. Only know it in terms of settlements, e.g. company v. union under third party (the arbiter). Guessing it's "price arbitrage" meaning profiting off price discrepancies. But not sure how it relates to betting under the circumstances OP described, maybe it's the same thing.

Because it became easy to do. If your phone dispensed cocaine we'd probably see a lot more addiction to that as well.

If your phone dispensed cocaine we'd probably see a lot more addiction to that as well.

Uh, how do you think most people buy cocaine these days? Carrier pigeon?

In the sense you can use your smartphone to buy cocaine from someone else, yes, but you still need that someone else - you can gamble directly on your smartphone. Buying cocaine has gotten easier but everything has gotten easier. What matters is that some things have gotten easier than others. Going to the cinema is easier - but relative to watching movies at home, it has gotten harder. Getting an airline ticket to go to Las Vegas has gotten easier - but relative to playing the monkey jpg and dog coin market, it has gotten harder.

Yes, the length of the feedback loop is incredibly relevant.

But just like being able to order 100 different varieties of fast food for delivery via your phone probably makes it harder to resist and contributes to obesity, the fact that you don't have to head down to a crappy part of town and exchange cash in a back alley is likely making drug addictions easier to feed.

So yes, 'because it became easy to do,' but that's the rub. There is literally NO behavior, vice or not, that is not easier to indulge now. If you live in the West, that is.

So yes, 'because it became easy to do,' but that's the rub. There is literally NO behavior, vice or not, that is not easier to indulge now. If you live in the West, that is.

Violence is the vice we have lost. A hundred and fifty years ago, a man with my resources would have had no problem seeing a public execution live at home or abroad. I don't think I could now without getting deep into weird travel destinations.

In my dad's generation, if I went out to a bar I would have no problem getting into a fistfight, and while it would have been distasteful for a man in my position to get into a bar fight, it would not have been seen as disqualifying. I wouldn't lose my licenses, no one would say I was per-se a bad person, etc. Today, someone would probably tell my wife to leave because I'm a "violent man." I might go to jail, the mutual combat exception has been gutted.

I guess the counter would be something like violent video games or violent movies, but I don't think fighting digitally is quite the same vibe.

a man with my resources would have had no problem seeing a public execution live at home or abroad. I don't think I could now without getting deep into weird travel destinations.

/r/narcofootage has some absolutely gruesome stuff out of Mexico every so often.

It would be terribly ill-advised, but if you were willing to travel down there you might be able to arrange something.

https://reynolds-news.com/2020/10/04/executed-via-guillotine-an-eye-witness-account/

In the 19th century a good bourgeois could spend a spring afternoon going to see a guillotine execution, then go on with his tour of France. He could tell all his friends about it at home, the way I might describe an art exhibition or a religious ceremony I witnessed abroad, a curiosity.

Today I'd have to go try to make contact with a cartel, somehow, without myself inevitably getting scammed or murdered, and if I ever mentioned it to anyone at home it would disqualify me as a normal bourgeois.

Much like the op comment talked about how sports gambling went from "knowing a shady bookey at a bar down by the river, never mention it in polite society" to "I use the draftkings app on my phone with my wife, and own their stock." Watching a live execution has gone the other way entirely.

Right, but there are 24 hours in the day. You cannot increase all behaviors - if people are spending more time gambling, they're spending less time doing something else.

I assure you it is possible to consume drugs, gamble. And spend copious amounts of money all at the same time.

Last time I went to the casinos they has attendants who you could pay to give you massage while you played.

Surely AI would never lie to me!

The comment about raiding drug dealers sounding really fun reminds me of how Yes Man described everything in Fallout New Vegas.

"Siri, please call an Uber, I need a getaway driver."

There's been Powerball hype when the jackpot got big for ages, I remember it back in the 90s. So I wouldn't read too much into that one at least. But overall I think your point is reasonable.

You are correct, on the other hand, the jackpots keep growing in size.

https://www.lottoexposed.com/jackpots-graph-lottery-widget/

Nah, drugs are always worse because of the other negative externalities aside from emptying your pocketbook.

I do hate that nothing is culturally taboo anymore. Everything has to be either explicitly codified by law or impossible to criticize. Anarcho-tyranny is the inevitable consequence of soft barriers being removed. Everything will be illegal, nothing will be equally enforced.

I do hate that nothing is culturally taboo anymore

Uhh, there are certain ideas that if stated in public will still get you pilloried, but are not directly punished by law.

I do think we've gone too far in the direction of preventing people from restricting the types of persons and businesses and behaviors they tolerate in their local area.

That is, I think a given township should be allowed to pass laws that prevent strip clubs, gay bars, abortion clinics, and/or marijuana dispensaries from operating openly in their jurisdictions. And the only justification they should need is "we find such things unhealthy and corrosive to social fabric and would prefer not to live near them."

But that statement I just made might be one of those taboo ideas that would cause outrage merely for speaking it in certain people's earshot.

Think the problem is that 'social barriers' are now permeable enough that one can't accept something without, in effect, tacitly approving that it become ubiquitous.

You can pretty much ONLY have either a blanket ban, heavily enforced, or ads everywhere and run into it constantly on the streets.

I'm overstating it, but yeah, once something crosses the barrier into social 'acceptability' it tends to jump to straight-up social approval. I contemplate this a lot.

It can go the other way, see tobacco cigarettes.

I don’t know that that’s actually true. Strip clubs, for example, are not particularly socially approved despite being common enough and not ultrastigmatized.

Give it another twenty years. Stripping is already portrayed as female empowerment in the media, falling under the umbrella of sex work, which is gradually shifting into mainstream acceptability.

Are you confusing stripping with pole dancing? I'd like to see evidence that it's the former and not just the latter, which has caught on as its own hobby/psuedo-sport that is largely divorced from the sex-work context.

I don't have much to add here except to say that this has been a very shocking/amusing development. I use instagram, and the amount of my female friends who just casually post pole dancing videos in revealing underwear is completely weirding me out. I'm not complaining of course, I'm simply bewildered. Just a few years ago I would find it unthinkable.

And the 9s/10s that get into modeling also appear to have this culture of getting naked at every opportunity. Not with a pornographic intent, it's always 'artistic' to some extent.

I don't know if that's necessarily the case. In Pennsylvania, at least, the social acceptability of gambling far preceded it's legality. In the early 2000s the campaign to legalize gambling was largely predicated on the fact that the casinos in West Virginia were full of PA residents, as evidenced by the number of PA plates in the parking lots. From there it was a long, gradual slide as states tried to outdo each other. First it was going to be limited to slots but WV legalized table games ahead of PA's approval so PA had to go ahead and add table games. They were supposed to limit licenses to one per region (with special rules for racetracks) to prevent it from becoming like WV where there are "hotspots" all over the place. Then these rules were gradually relaxed to allow more smaller casinos, and small game of chance licenses for bars. It's still not as bad as WV, but with online gaming and the emergence of sports books it's hard to tell PA from any other state that allows gambling and isn't Nevada.

Hm. Now I’ve got to give that some thought.

My knee jerk reaction is—surely it’s been this way since the 80s, at least. But pre color TV? Pre radio? Perhaps not.

I don’t think atomic communitarianism would be possible without modern+ technology, but that is also the most powerful universalizing force. One can more easily tolerate what one can’t see...

That's basically what I'm saying. Vegas used to be just some place you could go to gamble, then leave and come back home and never be faced with a slot machine or card table. Oh they'd try to convince you to come back, but "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" was actually a mostly true slogan.

So there was a solid separation between real life ('normal') and the fantasy life that Vegas promised.

Now, Vegas will pretty much come to you, where-ever you are.

I recently had to take a road trip to Oklahoma. I live in one of the strictest states in the country for pot; Oklahoma has extremely loose regs on medical marijuana.

Now, I should say up front- I don’t care about people smoking pot on their couch, but I want nothing to do with it, don’t like it or want to be around it or even be reminded overmuch it exists, but you do you.

And, well, seeing the billboards for medical marijuana(prescription guaranteed!) or obviously non medical marijuana for prescription holders made me rethink my ‘this stuff should be legal so we can tax it and spend the money on roads instead of having the black market spend it on murdering children in Mexico’. Strip clubs are now the only Vice that’s allowed to be a Vice in dark corners; you have to drag everything else out into the public view and make us aware of it. And all this in rural Oklahoma.

I've actually found sort of the opposite to be true. I'm a mountain biker, and a paddler, and a skier, and in the outdoor community here in Western PA (where even medical only became legal fairly recently) marijuana use is pretty rampant. I've been going to Colorado semi-regularly since 2019, though, and while it's fully legal there, there's a lot less evidence of it. You occasionally see dispensaries, but in mingling with all sorts of skiers and MTBers the subject only came up once, and that was when I hooked up with a girl who said she couldn't smoke weed because she was in the Navy and did shrooms instead. Other than that the main vice I noticed was craft beer, in that on mountaintops and overlooks and cool spots in the woods that would be smoke spots in PA were just guys drinking beer.

It’s funny, because the OK government used to be soooooo upset about marijuana that it kept suing Colorado. Pay no mind to the enormous casino next to the Red River; it’s Chickasaw, so it’s fine. Random pop-up gambling at gas stations, they’re cool too. But keep that devil’s lettuce out of here.

At least opioid abuse is still impolite.

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