We don't cap the ABV% of a bottle of Wine to an arbitrarily low number because of the prevalence of alcoholics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_beverage_control_sta...
I believe there's some relation between this and federal highway funding being tied to a minimum drinking age of 21, but I may be misremembering some half-read magazine article.
Great Reddit discussion about this: https://old.reddit.com/r/firewater/comments/9p1fwe/methanol_...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systembolaget
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinmonopolet
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BAsdrekkas%C3%B8la_Land...
Groceries stores can only sell beer, wine, and malts. If you want vodka, schnapps, and other hard liquors, you gotta go to a dedicated state-run liquor store.
Most of them are pretty small, too, so if you want something uncommon, it can be hard to find. Luckily the OLCC runs a website where you can search for specific items and it will tell you which stores (if any) carry it.
I do wish we could just get a BevMo though.
So it is censorship that we don't sell alcohol in schools?
It is censorship that we prohibit open beverages in automobiles and airplane cockpits?
Yikes. I expect this kind of "all regulations bad!!" nonsense on other social media, but sadly, starting to find it here too.
A well-armed society is a polite society.
IIRC from Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The just so story is when the govt's monopoly on violence is devolved to individuals, people will police themselves.
We now know empirically that a well-armed society is certainly not polite.
It's more like being armed makes not all, but far too many people, think they can be as much of an ass as they like at any time. It works fine, right up to the moment it doesn't and they get put down; but they never think of that in advance, so it doesn't stop that subset of the population being asses (or just shooting up the place), and the rest of us having to live life watching our sixes.
There's a reason that most civilized societies moved past it.
- We limit drinking by minors
- We limit smoking to outdoor areas
- We limit driving over certain speeds
We limit many, many things that an individual can do based on how they impact society as a whole. We even limit some things an individual can do that have no impact on society (but I disagree with this completely).
That is how societies work.
That's one interesting way to say "government regulation".
That's not an iron-clad argument, as legal gambling can still have mob ties, and tacit permission of some illegal gambling might still permit some level of oversight. And of course, legal gambling doesn't ensure reasonable or effective oversight or regulation.
By establishing known, legal, and possibly even bettor-favourable facilities or systems, gaming becomes something which might have some level of oversight. The increase in online gambling does severely cut into this argument though.
Another challenge, in the U.S., comes in the form of reservation casinos which can operate independently of other state prohibitions on gambling, which means that total eradication is at the very least difficult.
But that is an argument which might be made in answer to your "why not just..." question.
(I'm generally not a fan of gambling in any of its various forms. I'm cognisant of its pervasiveness and some of the worse aspects of it.)
Though the pre-2018 situation was that personal (that is, not intermediated by a company) gambling was legal, which provided an out.
Again: I'm positing the argument, I'm not advocating for it. And it does appear to be counterfactual.
Of course doing it in a way so it can't be tracked keeps the IRS ignorant, which is a big deal to many people
Guess it's good my luck was terrible in Vegas or I might've inadvertently committed tax fraud. Though now I'm curious if I had won a few hundred dollars would there have been tax due?
I'm pretty sure it's tax free in most countries.
Thanks for the correction.
I strongly suspect that one element of legalisation is that it normalises the activity, which lowers all sorts of social and psychological barriers to participation.
Another is that it creates self-organised self-interest groups. This is actually a really great way to ensure the longevity of governmental programmes, with both positive and negative examples: welfare systems such as Social Security, Medicare, and the ACA in the US are all immensely popular with the elderly, a staunch voting block, to the extent that its general trend toward conservativism doesn't fully mute interest in social welfare. The military-industrial complex is another, and a recent discussion I'd heard of the Inflation Reduction Act highlighted the constituencies built in to support it even in deep-red southern US states.
In the case of legalisation of gambling, drugs, and sex work, what had previously been the purview of criminal gangs now becomes "ordinary business" (though the thought occurs that the distinction between the two may be less than is commonly understood). To the extent that established businesses prove to be highly effective at defending even the most indefensible of practices (tobacco, alcohol, asbestos, lead, plastics, fossil fuels) is well established, and the risks of that path should be strongly considered.
Another option is to decriminalise rather than legalise a practice, but focus on policing the most problematic elements of the practice. That might be the provider side (as with drugs and gambling) or the consumer side (as with sex work, targeting johns), or on going up-market and tightly limiting or prohibiting private aggregators (e.g., pimps, drug lords) rather than focusing on low-level actors (streetwalkers, individual workers, street crews within drug operations).
State-operated operations (gambling, lotteries, alcohol and tobacco sales, drug distribution *with integrated treatment), is another option, though it too isn't a surefire solution. My view is that lottery programmes in the US are out of control and a net negative, though in part that itself reflects the public-private partnership in the operation of many of these.
The solution to this problem would be mandatory sex worker licenses and mandatory yearly counseling that acts as an escape path for trafficking victims.
There are many women police officers in vice and many means with which to tackle sex trafficking, with or without the testimony of specific victims (bearing in mind that sex trafficking almost always involves many victims).
Yearly contact seems ... sparse... there's more sense to be had in mandatory weekly or fortnightly STI checkups, etc. which incorporates contact with trained medical professionals familiar with the ins and outs of te game.
Generally, a law that made it illegal to advertise age-restricted activities to audiences where a significant portion of the audience would be under-age should be a workable solution. Let the courts decide what that gray area of "significant portion" is on a case by case basis.
Humans are weak and easy to manipulate, and some more so than others. It seems like the question is always about the degree to which the governments ought to intervene to protect us from each other...and ourselves.
And not sure where you sit on this, but for me personally, gambling ads cross a line as gambling has major negative effects to public well-being, especially to those who are the most financially in need.
> It seems like the question is always about the degree to which the governments ought to intervene to protect us from each other...and ourselves.
Of course. That's why I defined the degree I was advocating for
Want to see an image? Follow a link, sir. It is far too distracting to have it simply be there, between the words, enticing us.
The idea was to destroy the 'brand value' and positive associations that cigarette companies have worked hard to build.
It does work, but I dont know that the concept would translate to digital media that well.
I don't think it'd work well online for similar reasons, the internet is global, it would just disadvantage local companies for no real gain due to our population. It would have to be a concerted global effort. I think there is quite a bit of overlap with accessibility too (simple and quiet is easier to parse for computers and humans than confusing noise), so maybe a push in that direction.
I agree with your overall point, but this is incorrect. I'm pretty sure there is already a law that says they cannot have fake food in commercials, at least for restaurants. There have been articles explaining how they take a "stock" hamburger (ok, they call it a "sandwich", technically) and dress it up for the commercial. But the interesting part is that the food photographers are constrained to using only ingredients from the store, they cannot use paint or plastic to represent the food. One of the little details I remember was they would use a brush to draw the ketchup to one side of the bun to make it look like it was liberally applied. It's quite interesting how they achieve the final goal - even though it looks NOTHING like the product that is delivered to the consumer.
And even if we look just at under-age audiences, a ban for them make sense, since that for a decent-sized portion of teenage boys, sports is an obsession. Having them pummeled by sports-betting ads at an age when they are often exploring new things is probably not a good idea, as it will make betting (and for some of these, betting addiction) a part of their lives while they are young.
In Michigan this is part of the Responsible Gaming program. You can opt out for certain lengths of time and they will not let you back for any reason. It's on a per-casino basis though, not some global list.
You can also get restricted if you ever claim to support that you need the money, have to pay bills, can't wait on the withdraw, etc.
I made a mistake once, while upset at some promo conditions not being clear, that I was "counting" on it. I meant I was counting on using it to gamble more (lmao) but they thought I meant for bills and ended up having to go through a special process to get my account back.
Like any market, those with knowledge and power systematically enrich themselves by extracting wealth from those without.
If sports betting should be banned because it exploits those without wealth or knowledge, then other markets with many naive participants should also be banned, such as markets for stocks and crypto.
Investment in equities is principally a non-zero-sum positive EV game motivated by rational expectations for preservation and growth of wealth.
The fact that some financial actors have very good sharpe ratios or dominate capture of trading profits on millisecond horizons isn’t a significant detriment to the larger good resulting from retail investment.
How do you draw the line between someone who wants to gamble recreationally and someone who does it because they are addicted without harming the recreational parties?
A data point for you...
I was on a train earlier this year and I was standing behind someone out with their wife/girlfriend. He had his phone in his hand the whole time with a gambling app opened (the green one, PaddyPower maybe?). I couldn't read the screen exactly but there was a list of fixtures for football matches and a button next to each one. From memory, I think each button was odds for the game, e.g. 10:1 Luton win vs Exeter or something.
Anyway, the point is that (again, from memory) at least 8 times in the journey, he opened and closed the app and clicked on 10+ of these odds buttons, while in conversation with his girlfriend who had put her phone away at the start of the journey.
I vaguely recall him checking his balance at one point too.
Anyway, I thought I'd back up your story by telling one of mine where I watched someone place 50+ bets on a 30 min train journey! It's frighteningly easy (emphasis on "frightening")
Edit: This happened a while back and I remember telling this story to people at the time so the numbers may be off but they're in the ballpark!
One regulation would be banning gambling advertising, for the same reason why smoking ads are (I think?) banned. It is especially nefarious how companies lure in new customers with free bets, often with unscrupulous cash-out conditions, in order to get people hooked. It’s the equivalent of ads providing someone a coupon code to get several boxes of free cigarettes, at which point they get hooked.
Another change I’d like to see is the end of mobile gambling. I’ve never done it, but from watching friends do it, it was far too easy to deposit money, or borrow money on credit, and bet it frivolously. At least if such behavior is confined to a casino, there is some larger barrier to entry for people.
I do not know if this is true in other states, but certain states have the ability for an individual to self-institute a gambling ban at all facilities in the state. I’m not sure if this applies to gambling online. If not, then it should. And if other states don’t have it, then they would greatly benefit from it.
It also seems somewhat fair to me to tax the casinos and other companies profiting from gambling and using that money to fund services for people who become addicted. If you’re going to help create a problem, you should have to help clean it up.