Gambling

I have noticed that 200 [insert currency here] seems to be quite a standard limit people set themselves. When we went on holiday to Vegas (incredibly frustrating if you're 17, as I was: you can't do anything, not even order a water at a bar), my parents set themselves limits of $200 each.

My dad then proceeded to blow $600 on a firing range with myself and my brother the following day, but that's not the point

With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.

That's nothing. Living in NJ, my family goes to Atlantic City once in a while, and I found out when I was younger that if you're under 21 they won't even let you sit in the vicinity of a bar.

Insert witty and clever quip here. My page, as the database hates my handle.

That was the cause of quite a bit of drama in the 18-20 years of being in the military.

Usually managed to get a bunch of NCO's to go "Nah man, he's with us. We won't let him drink, just let him stay with us." when we would go into a bar, and they would let me hang out against policy. I try to do the same with our younger troops now.

On the other hand there's no such thing as secondhand gambling. Never had to hope the wind doesn't blow my way on the bus stop because somebodys passing time gambling.

Laws are made to be broken. You're next, thermodynamics.

But you might get second hand bad luck in your lungs!

Well, I think there's a point in all of this. Tobacco isn't played up as a health tonic, or a panacea. You'll get a boost, but over time, you'll get a dependency. Certainly, there's misinformation that goes around, and kids get hooked young, but there's few who would argue that tobacco is beneficial to your life.

Gambling, on the other hand, has a huge marketing arm designed to make it look like a way to get rich quick. And to be fair, every once in a while, you have a run of good luck and win for awhile, and the casino makes this seem as the norm with all those ads of people who won it big. But Vegas wasn't built on the backs of winners.

The point is that if you come in with the expectation that you will lose everything you gamble with, and have fun, there's nothing wrong. But gambling is addictive, and it can ruin people's lives just as well as a hard drug.

I don't feel it's particularly fair to blame the institution because people are stupid and lack self-control.

As to the image issue: Lets take the military or firefighters as an example. In the US the military is glorified in a lot of ways, sometimes deliberately in recruitment advertisements, sometimes not so deliberately through entertaining media such as games and movies. The reality of the military is that I haven't saved the world from terrorists, or anything on that level of glory. The reality of the military is that you often spend a ton of time waiting around, sitting on your ass, being yelled at, and if you don't have a combat arms job, your chances of experiencing any of the so-called glory advertised are non-existent.(Compare this to coming in and losing a bit of money when you, for some reason, thought you would win it big) Then even further down the scale, there is the trauma of actual war itself, the trauma of taking a life, and the trauma of losing friends or seeing people get gravely wounded or die. Compare that to losing a ton of money gambling irresponsibly in a way that makes you miserable and really affects you deeply.

Now lets take firefighting for example, when most people think of firefighters, they think of heroic figures risking their lives going through burning buildings, or holding the hose and aiming it at the fire to knock it down. The reality of firefighting is that most of the month you'll be sitting around doing nothing, and when there's an actual fire, there's usually one team that is there at the front lines knocking down the fire. Invisible to the world is 5 times as many teams who are doing gruntwork, such as chopping fire line, carrying hose, and setting up equipment. Then on the flip side, there's the constant exposure to the traumatically injured and running the risk of being injured or killed, or having a friend injured or killed, in the process of doing those things.

It's not that much different from gambling being shown as decadent and glorious. The reality of it is that you might win a bit of extra cash, which is great. You might win the frigging jackpot and change your life forever, which would be awesome, or you could lose money. And if you're foolish, you might lose everything.

I suppose the image issue is similar but the outcome is different. The small chance of doing something positive in the military and firefighting, versus a large chance of doing nothing of note. But, with gambling it is a small chance at winning big with a large chance of actively losing money for no value, which is negative.

I would say the difference between going on a vacation and blowing $1500 doing it and gambling money in a similar fashion is that if you don't treat the situations similarly (I am spending x dollars for y hours of entertainment) then you run into a problem.

It feels to me a serious problem because the amount of people who just plain don't get that is a far higher percentage than people who do. It's just that, with the way we've restricted gambling so much, it's not in your face and thus most people don't have a chance to see if they'll lack that self-control and blow their whole life savings on gambling.

I figure there isn't really a way to fix it, short of making people get "Gambling Awareness Cards" that involve attending a class for the right to gamble.

And that would be rather stupid.

I don't know. You typically attack vices by restricting their availability, but not making them illegal (to avoid the black market problem) and then more importantly, educating people. That's how we deal with smoking, why not gambling?

To answer the rhetorical question, because it is literally impossible to restrict gambling. At least in the case of drugs, there is a physical product whose distribution can be controlled to some extent. Unless you propose to restrict the sale of playing cards and dice, you can't do the same about curtailing basement gambling (and that's quite frankly where it all starts; not in casinos by a long shot).

Even then, you can always find coins to flip.

Doesn't stop me from smoking, just annoys the shit out of me. It'd do the same in concern to gambling.

I've always kind of wanted to run a back room blackjack table...

One of the things that annoys me the most about the current situation (at least in my homecountry) is that, since the State controls gambling, it has all incentives to get people to gamble and waste far more money than they should. Example: whenever somebody wins big at lotto, the news broadcasting services owned by the state (the RAI) makes a news item about it. Whenever there is a big prize, the news services owned by the state say it as a news item, and do a poorly-concealed advertisement right within the news.

And then there are the real advertisements, which are about as subtle as you can imagine; and the only reference to the possible risks is a brief sentence at the end, which loosely translates to "play it safe" and sounds more like a recommendation than like a warning.

People joke that gambling is an "idiot tax"; but — of course, excepted for people like Barkley who do it for their own amusement and know perfectly well that they are going to trade some money for an entertaining evening and nothing else — I would rather call it an "ignorance tax". And, since ignorance is obviously correlated with poverty, ultimately it is a poverty tax; which is a concept that I find is too despicable for words. The last thing that somebody who barely makes ends meet needs is somebody to use their poor grasp of probability to exploit them further.

edited 16th Jun '12 4:54:55 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

If I had my way, commercial gambling would be illegal. A game of cards between friends with a few bets to make things interesting is fine, but as soon as you start rolling out the slot machines, you're basically legalizing a form of theft.

Meh. If stupid people want to piss away money they can't afford to lose that's their problem. It's no different from 'investing' in shares or (post-2008) the property market.

I like gambling and am actually able to stick to spending limits and quit while I'm ahead. People who can't do that will just have to pay the price of their own weakness.

'All he needs is for somebody to throw handgrenades at him for the rest of his life...'

The problem with this, I think, is that people's "weakness" is not necessarily their fault. I am not likely to get dazzled by ridiculous schemes to try to "win big" by gambling and invest all of my money in it; but then again, my parents were rich enough to afford me an adequate education. What about the people who are not so lucky? What about that old friend of mine, who I did not hear of since we were kids, who wrote me to ask me if I wanted to invest on a gambling scheme which was blatantly based on the Gambler's Fallacy (I hope to have managed to convince him that it is a bad idea...).

Just because somebody does not understand probability, or had a bad education, it does not mean that they deserve to lose their livelihood. My great-grandfather was a butcher, and never got any education beyond reading, writing and basic arithmetics; but according to all that I know, he was not a bad person. The likes of him, today, do not deserve to be deceived by the likes of me just because we got to learn about Kolmogorov's Axioms and they didn't.

edited 16th Jun '12 7:06:15 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

If a person develops a gambling addiction, it can not only ruin their life, but the lives of their family or the people around them. It's not unlike a drug addiction in that it can be extremely difficult to stop without professional help.

edited 16th Jun '12 7:58:14 AM by Talby

I don't have much sympathy for addicts of any sort. For their families, perhaps, but not for the addicts themselves.

A person's weakness of will is always their own fault. They might not be bad people but you can hardly make them stronger or smarter by banning things that are perfectly safe in the hands of stronger, smarter folks. Christ, you'd have ban nearly everything.. As long as they are weak or ignorant somebody, somewhere will scam them, be it in a casino or by convincing them that 'house prices only ever go up'.

edited 16th Jun '12 8:20:29 AM by InverurieJones

'All he needs is for somebody to throw handgrenades at him for the rest of his life...'

What if I can make them happier? Or less likely to end up in misery and kill themselves?

Because if I value an evening's entertainment for me more than somebody else's life, I am not a very nice person, I think.

edited 16th Jun '12 8:22:35 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

I must disagree. In fact, the attitude your present is one of the biggest obstacles to people getting the professional help that they sometimes need to get over the addiction. When you start presenting things with blame and bias, you only encourage them to withdraw deeper into their cycle of addiction and to withdraw from everything else.

edited 16th Jun '12 8:22:10 AM by DarkConfidant

I gotta agree with Jones here, at least as far as gambling is concerned. I know how to gamble responsibly, and I don't want stupid people to fuck up one of my favorite passtimes. I don't like the concept of irresponsible people ruining something perfectly good and entertaining for the responsible people.

I'm not disagreeing with the idea that we can't just restrict gambling because some people are predisposed to a gambling addiction. I am disagreeing with the mentality that it is merely a lack of will or something that can be blamed on the individual.

Where I live, there is a voluntary system where people who have gambling addictions can essentially blacklist themselves from every casino in the state to prevent going into relapse.

I don't like the whole "Not their fault" habit the world is falling into these days.

What does anyone do that actually is their fault these days? Anyone?

^

I like the blacklist idea.

edited 16th Jun '12 8:58:05 AM by Barkey

I'd argue that it'd be your fault if you had a gambling addiction and didn't take steps needed to stop compulsively gambling, just like it'd be the fault of the alcoholic that doesn't even try to quit drinking.

"I don't know how I do it. I'm like the Mr. Bean of sex." -Drunkscriblerian

Blaming the addict sounds way too much blaming the victim, though. Yeah, they may be at fault, but the addiction itself is already punition enough. These people should be helped, not blamed.

This sounds kinda ironic, given your nick.*