The other thing I’d add is a mandatory system where people can tell the company not to allow them to bet with a lengthy time delay (say 90 days) to remove themselves from the list. Most people with problems know they have them at least some of the time and it’s important to give them tools to prevent moments of weakness.

Self exclusion is something that is handled by each states gaming enforcement department. All 34 states that have a self-exclusion program also have wildly different policies.

Is this mitigated by time to get between states?

They have a system for this in the UK https://www.gamstop.co.uk/ - though I only know it exists from TV adverts (presumably they are legally obligated to run these)

Limiting it to a licensed location, instead of app or website, and requiring cash instead of credit would likely be sufficient.

I'm pretty sure the owners of the licensed locations were principals in getting the online betting scene going. I am guessing here, but it seems likely they saw that it's inevitable that off-shore online sports books will exist, so they were driven to capitalize on it legally (from the US).

Censorship is not letting an adult eat a steak because a baby can't chew it.

We don't cap the ABV% of a bottle of Wine to an arbitrarily low number because of the prevalence of alcoholics.

Society always has and continues to limit access to certain things at certain times in certain places for certain groups of people for reasons that vary. We call it censorship/restrictions when we don’t like it. We call it reasonable control when we do.

a true liberalist would argue that you can sell your kids, as long as they agreed to it

The state I grew up in prohibited distilled spirits from being sold at non-State run stores.

Which is a methanol related health and safety measure grandfathered in as a holdover from the Volstead Act. All first world control have significant hazard analysis and supply chain integrity measures for food and drink.

I'm not sure that's the entirely the case, given that, when I was a kid, you couldn't buy non-distilled beverages at the grocery store either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_beverage_control_sta...

Temperance related measures post-Volstead - an insidious loophole to appease the Bible Belt whereby liquour is specifically exempted from the federal oversight of interstate commerce.

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.

I believe it’s drinking age and breath limit thresholds thanks to MADD.

Tangential—methanol poisoning from an improper brewing or distilling process is largely, maybe completely, a myth. Where toxicity events have occurred they are almost always deliberate or accidental adulteration, e.g. fortifying moonshine with industrially "denatured" (deliberately poisoned) alcohol. There has been a lot of sloppy journalism in such cases that doesn't question the myth, as well as Prohibition-era propaganda that lives on to this day.

Great Reddit discussion about this: https://old.reddit.com/r/firewater/comments/9p1fwe/methanol_...

TIL. That said, I hadn't anticipated much rational in Prohibition rationale. The thread did support my suspicion that grappa hangovers are their own special category of hell though!

Most Nordic countries also have a state monopoly on alcohol, and these are as first-world as it gets.

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...

Oregon is that way.

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.

Many states cap ABV of spirits.

And many European countries can't sell e.g. Everclear. The key bit of my statement was 'arbitrarily low'.

We used to have to travel to the next state over to buy Everclear (you know, for the _good_ parties) and bring it back.

Riiight.

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.

I'm often reminded of the rationalist liturgy:

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.

Indeed, that is a nice sentiment, but not borne out by the actual data.

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.

It's a balancing act. We limit <some thing> if the damage to society caused by it is greater than <some amount>. With the caveat that getting those limits put in place can be complicated, given the influence of money on political will.

- 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.

It would also result in way less profits, so we'd need something truly incredible to happen to see it through.

> something truly incredible

That's one interesting way to say "government regulation".

Government regulation that results in the government having less money is truly incredible.

Examples are not particularly hard to come by: All government regulations to reduce smoking, all regulations to reduce petrol cars. All regulations to ban drugs. All of those aim to reduce the sale of some item the government could or does tax. I’m sure more can be found.

The only actual problem casino gambling, lotteries, and sports betting has been intended to solve is to generate revenue for state and local governments. Limiting bets to $5 would ensure failure for that purpose. Gambling addiction, crime, cheating, game fixing, etc are unfortunate side effects, but not real problems, in the eyes of lawmakers.

Why not just ban it? I fail to see the point of spending all of this money administering an industry with such a low total income. That would lose money every year and keep increasing.

A total ban ... on legal gambling ... would likely lead to at least some increase in illegal gambling, which of necessity allies itself to organised crime.

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.)

According to the article, the other way around didn't happen: the legalization didn't decrease illegal gambling

That would put a damper on things.

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.

It's a lot easier for the IRS to track your betting earnings when it's reported to them directly by the broker.

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

Huh TIL that the usa taxes gambling winnings, and that you can offset with losses up to the amount of winnings (https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc419)

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.

In the UK you can choose to pay tax on your stake when you place it, so that your winnings are tax free, or not, in which case your winnings are taxed.

Are you sure? I never make bets over £20 or so, but my understanding is if I hit it big there's no tax to worry about - this source seems to agree, unless you're a professional gambler which somewhat makes sense https://intelligentodds.com/gambling/do-you-pay-tax-on-gambl...

According to that link, it changed in 2001. I left the uk before that. Now I feel very old.

Thanks for the correction.

This is true of other vices as well. Many have argued that legalized sex work will decrease the amount of human trafficking, when reality has shown it actually increases it.

I'd really like to see an in-depth analysis of multiple such cases of ... what to call it? Vice permissivity? And what effects stack up.

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 problem with legalized sex work is that when a cop is faced with a human trafficking victim, there is nothing he can do if the trafficking victim does not testify and explicitly ask for police intervention, which is a high bar to clear for a victim that would at best become homeless in a foreign country and at worst receive severe repercussions for an escape attempt.

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 three frameworks of legalisation in Australia, none of which ban the selling of sex, all of which limit or criminalise brothels and forms of "organised prostition by third parties".

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.

I don't have a strong opinion in the matter, but the argument is that banning things don't automatically make them go away. Banning things that people want to do will make organized crime spring up around it, which is often worse. The idea is, by allowing it in some limited legal way, you make it unprofitable for the organized criminals.

Yeah and I think I believed in aspects of this line of logic when my state legalized sportsbooks. I believe in harm reduction in most regards. What happened though, in my opinion, is an increase in access wound up creating an increase in net harm. Just my assessment. Timing is worth noting, this was rolled out to users initially during quarantine times.

Yeah but how do you do that when you have online casinos who are conveniently placed on some tropical island state?