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  But if you want to outlaw this harmful activity [licensed gambling], you have to find a way to replace 6.4% of Maryland’s budget, which is slightly less than the entire amount the state brings in from corporate taxes.

A fraction of the proceeds of losing bets from a fraction of Maryland's citizens contributes almost the same to state services -- EMS, education, road maintenance, etc -- than the total corporate taxes levied on all businesses.

Do I misunderstand, or is this just actually incredible?

It feels like banning advertising for gambling would be a sweet spot between harm reduction and maintaining individual liberty.

Sports gambling ads have ruined sports media. State lottery ads are even worse. The government should not spend money to encourage its own citizens to partake in harmful activities.

Related:

Coffeezilla: Exposing the Gambling Epidemic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45773049 - October 2025

People are also leaving out stuff like Pokemon, Yu Gi Oh, and Magic The Gathering.

All of them also introduce rarities (arbitrary exclusiveness), hidden cards in a pack, and extreme gambling gamification.

The only non-gambling MtG packs are the preconstructed commander decks. All 100 cards are published. But the packs and boxes? Pure gambling, especially for the chase rare cards.

And before anyone asks, yes, my username is based after this $2 card. https://edhrec.com/commanders/nekusar-the-mindrazer

There is a Chinese term called 'porn gambling drugs business'. And these businesses will always be lucrative

Gambling, especially low cost continuous play, can be a symptom of latent mental disease, especially depression or simply low intelligence to conceive the fraud (the company always wins). These people need protection by banning ads for any gambling and provide support and guidance to uncover the scam.

What a bunch of fearful people in the comments.

Gambling , especially in person gambling such as poker is basically a toned down version of combat sports where you are socially allowed to take something from somebody else because the other person accepted the conditions by sitting at the table or entering the casino.

Much like a boxer accepts the risk when they enter the ring.

The same thing happens on your beloved stock market, you just don't see it.

I hope if there is a regulatory backlash it results in loot crates in games getting regulated, ideally outlawed.

Apologists for that practice claimed there was no harm in it, but now we see the harm - a generation of young men trained on those that is now older and ruining their financial future on sports betting.

Just ban advertising and let me gamble.

Isn’t everything deceptive? Isn’t every thing that produces a dopaminergic burst addictive? Should we dismantle and ban fast food? Social media? Fried food? Everything is coercive. You want a cure; force feed people mindfulness and psychology. All commercials are potentially coercive and deceptive. I’m watching a Walgreens commercial; there is no line in the commercial, the person behind the pharmacy is smiling and happy, no one else is in the store, the “paid for” actor leaves the pharmacy happy. This just seem like the reality of any Walgreens I’ve visited. But I digress; my argument for addiction markets as a recovering alcoholic… I grew more as a human from the experience of addiction and recovery than any other day to day mundane dopamine driven activity. Sometimes we need to fall to get back up. It makes us stronger, we learn to ask for help.

I am really tired of the lazy argument style of using "corporate" as a synonym for "bad". I too think it's bad to encourage addictive gamblers. I don't care if it is corporate, individual, or state run.

“Take athletics. Americans love sports, and that cultural centerpiece is being corrupted in an orgy of greed and speculative ferver.”

Professional (and collegiate) athletics has always been corrupt - now it’s just more visible.

The only thing needing abolishing is the advertising of gambling.

> “21% of sports bettors say they’ve verbally abused an athlete, either in person or online, after losing money on a bet.”

This is exactly what it felt like to work in crypto.

Personal choice is when it just exists, like Las Vegas in Nevada.

If you really really want to gamble then go, travel to Nevada and do it.

The problem is sticking their filthy ads and purchased propagandists into the faces of vulnerable people and society at large.

Preying on victims over the phone, soc. media ads, bought manipulators so called influencers with no morale.

How about we treat people like adults?

We should do licenses for gambling that cap betting at some percentage of your income or wealth. For example: you earn 50k annually, you get to gamble 250 or 0.5%.

Matt Stoller is an idiot, but it's hard to disagree with the thesis.

This is a horribly written article littered with logical fallacies. Nearly every point is just a random fact about gambling that doesn’t add to the argument.

- fanduel owns networks. So what?

- gambling taxes = corporate taxes in MD. This is misleading as state level corporate are effectively $0

- 20% of Americans have placed a bet. So?

I have never done sports gambling myself but this article fails to convince that it’s a problem

It's weird how we're so strict on consenting adults gambling, but when underage children gamble on Counter Strike, we as a society deem it totally fine, acceptable, and normal.

I don't get it. Somehow, them being underage makes it better and not worse??

Meanwhile Mr POTUS himself wants to introduce prop betting in his social media platform.

Don’t expect anything to change anytime soon

Nice try MGM Grand.

I'll make a bet here:

By the 2040 US presidential election, anti-gambling legislation will be a bigger party platform issue than abortion is for one of the two major US political parties.

We are ruining a generation of men with this, just as we did with alcohol in the era before prohibition. A wiser and more sensible approach is desperately needed today, but will not come for another 15 years until the damage is inescapable to see.

What happened to America. Maybe 70's or 40's were it's peak. Every activity has become a betting. Investments, sports, relationships, home-buying.

Addictions are a symptom of having an excessive amount of free time, floating money and lack of fear of reprisal from family and society and lack of basic wisdom.

Excessive prosperity breaks social rythm. It removes dependencies and relations across individuals. It's like a tree turned into chips, with freedom for every chip. As individuals, you won (materialistic luxury etc), but as a family, community or country, you fail.

I don't think you can kill corporate run gambling - people will just use some offshore website instead.

It might be something we should treat more like smoking.

- Require a disclosure of the EV of each bet as the user is placing it. E.g.: Expected loss $5.

- Ad targeting restrictions.

The problem isn't the 70M people who placed bets, its the ~25M with broken risk aversion.

These are mostly men, and a very specific type of men. You can try to curtail their access to gambling but we're missing the underlying problem.

This line from the ads always strikes me as darkly ironic:

> if you need help making responsible choices, call…

Like, the only “responsible” choice is not to gamble online. What do they even think we’re supposed to take away from that line of the commercial?

I am a semi-professional gambler, based in the UK. To parse that statement: I have a day job; I make about as much income from software that trades on betting exchanges as I do from the day job, except that income is tax free (because UK law does not recognise it as a taxable trade - another debate); and I spend a lot of time watching, reading and understanding changes in the gambling industry because a significant chunk of my savings income comes from it.

The UK went through almost everything the US is going through right now some years ago, where problem gambling led to suicides and people struggling to pay bills. Multiple measures have been taken that seem to have directly helped that situation: VIP programs have been scrapped; advertising is being limited; and, you may have to prove you can afford to bet the levels you're betting at to an operator, which is an incredibly unpopular move (who wants to send their pay slips to their bookie?), but does seem to have quelled things a little.

However there is more to do, and there is something you can do right now if you are losing money and want to reduce the impact these products have on you.

Stop playing casino and video slot games. Focus on sports only.

The myth is that the problem gamblers are losing their money on 2nd Division Nigerian netball games in the middle of the night. Yes, there are some people who are looking for sports action all the time, but that's not the biggest source of problems.

With sports, you have a little time to think. I recommend not playing in-play unless you have automated that solution to find EV and its executing for you (I know people who make money doing this on Betfair in the UK). Bet before game only, and you will have a built-in "cool off" period.

You don't get that with casino games or video slots. Its relentless, and you can lose thousands an hour before you even realise what is happening.

And then, there's EV. Expected Value. Sometimes (actually, kinda often), the odds a bookmaker puts up are a bit wrong.

Not every price, it might be a prop bet on a particular player, and they're putting a price up on a Monday for a Saturday game, and you have a spreadsheet that dings something and tells you what the kelly stake should be and you put 1% of your bankroll on it, and then you might sell it back on Saturday morning when the market has got right or you let it ride (and there's maths to tell you when to do that and when not), and you ride some variance but make money.

That's not possible on casino or video slot games. They just bleed you. There is no EV. If you win, you got lucky (the scientific name for this is "experienced positive variance"), and you should run away quickly before you lose it back. But the sure way to win on those games is the same as in Wargames: don't play at all.

I'm biased, I realise that, but I would love to see the outlawing of casino and slot games on mobile.

I would also like to see more education in schools around probability and statistics (the founder of SIG, a storied institution who is now a market maker on Kalshi, the prediction market platform), argues that the fascination with calculus in schools might have helped during the space race, but today we need people to really understand Bayes theorem more than anything else. I agree.

If you want to start your own education in how to bet a little smarter and lose a little less, I can recommend The Logic of Sports Betting [0] and its sequel Interception [1]. I also like Dan Abrams' book [2], that talks about expected growth, not just exepcted value.

These are not get rich quick schemes, but it will give you an idea of what goes on in the minds of people who try and take this all very seriously. You'll still need to think about modelling and how to get your own prices to compare with those you're being offered, but if you're not prepared to do that work, what is it you're actually doing?

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Sports-Betting-Ed-Miller/dp/109...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Interception-Secrets-Modern-Sports-Be...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/But-How-Much-Did-Lose-ebook/dp/B0DRZ2...

On a somewhat related note, there seems to be a huge interest in vice policing on social media. Gambling, sex, drugs, these are some of humanity's oldest vices. Why has it become so popular on social media to highlight these, along with a narrative of social or cultural decline?

There has recently been many looks at the epidemic in gambling. Wonder how all of the focus seem to happen at the same time

Off the top of my head:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-31/great-bri...

https://kyla.substack.com/p/gamblemerica-how-sports-betting-...

https://www.ft.com/content/e80df917-2af7-4a37-b9af-55d23f941...

https://www.dopaminemarkets.com/p/the-lottery-fication-of-ev...

https://www.investors.com/news/investing-gambling-robinhood-...

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-premier-league-footb...

https://www.ft.com/content/a39d0a2e-950c-4a54-b339-4784f7892...

I used to live in Sri Lanka and one of the most pervasive things I noticed when I moved to the west were all these gambling ads. There, it was widely accepted that gambling was harmful. Yes, you could do it, but you could never advertise it. I'm shocked that my 3rd world country has way better control over this than the west.

I don’t have an overly paternalistic view of the government. I’m rather libertarian in that regard. But is it too much to ask that we place some guardrails on things that are know to have trouble with? Smoking, drinking, gambling, etc.

I certainly feel that people should be able to do it if they really want to, but making it super accessible and highly advertised seems like a bad idea.

> Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong rattled off crypto buzzwords at the end of the Q3 call, resolving $84K in prediction market bets to "yes."

https://x.com/Cointelegraph/status/1984161085780263322

Fun fact: Biff Tannen was modeled after Donald Trump.

Turns out the darkest timeline is also the dumbest.

https://www.nme.com/news/back-to-the-future-writer-reveals-b...

Listen kids, your dopamine circuits are beyond screwed up already. All this is designed to aggregate capital… into crypto ecosystem

Predictably gets several things wrong.

1. Gambling is a real addiction. It is quite strange that someone using the term "Addiction Markets" fails to understand this. People who are gambling addicts were gambling before it was legal, they were just getting their legs broken in a way that was non-visible to you.

2. If you ban gambling, the ability of people to gamble online is not reduced in any way. None. The US offshore market was the biggest sports gambling market in the world before it was legalised. Not even close.

3. I would take a close look at how offshore gambling operators work before casting aspersions about onshore. Onshore, providers are working with regulators to an extremely significant degree. Offshore, sites will advertise that you can gamble on their site if you are on an onshore ban list. If onshore providers are so terrible, why is this the case?

4. The attempt to say that lotteries are addictive is just nonsense. Generally, there is a very poor understanding of what gambling addiction is (again, point 1). Certain games are designed to appeal to gambling addicts (again, the most prevalent ground for these was...the US...before online gambling was legal, biggest market by far, almost all the large companies making these games come from the US), those games are harmful. Lottery, sports gambling, raffles, DFS, etc. lack all of these properties. In particular, providers will often use virtual events (virtual horse-racing) to try to mimic the properties of more addictive products (with relatively little success)...because the original thing is not as appealing to addicts.

5. It is correct that the UK has "stake limits" (not quite sure what the author thinks this...all regulated US providers also have these, some states also have deposit acks...which would be beyond the UK standard, I would say many US states are ahead of the UK) but this is only on certain kinds of machines. The author spills a huge amount of words, talks about Trump, talks about the 1980s...but doesn't seem to talk about these machines, which are more prevalent in the US, at all. The author doesn't say anything about the issues in the UK being the same. VIP programs in the UK aren't regulated in any way different to the US (providers have no market lists). There is one important difference: in the UK, the government has given gambling providers that powers to perform extensive background checks, they take your income, an audit of your assets and then decide whether you can use their product...people opposed to gambling never mention this. How does that fit with neoliberal? A company being given the same powers as regulators?

6. There is an issue with corruption in the US. There is no coincidence that the law on online gambling changed within a few months of one of the largest donors blocking this. Both sides benefitted from this as the largest Democrat donor in those years was the Las Vegas casino workers union. Again, because this corruption meant that some kinds of gambling didn't happen...no mention. This was, we now know, hundreds of billions in value generated by paying politicians hundreds of millions a year...no mention.

7. The author appears to be unaware that DFS existed after UIGEA, not "laughable"...just a basic understanding of the sequence of events.

8. Gambling is not inherently addictive. Many things that are legal in the US are not only inherently addictive, but are inherently harmful. Liberals care about you losing your money when you buy a $5 scratch-off, they don't care about you losing your mind with mind-bending psychoactive substances.

Should be abolished, but please leave the prediction markets and just limit participation to a small number.

What really struck me is how gambling has quietly become infrastructure. That's a deeply unsettling shift.

It's quite reactionary to label betting as addiction markets. I see little reason to draw that corollary to other, often detested, vices.

To label such activity as a tax on the poor is nothing more than a euphemism. I understand what is being said by the verbiage "tax" in this context. Although no real tax is voluntary.

Labeling this as an issue that disproportionately affects poor is misleading. This is an issue for a few select individuals who make poor decisions. The correlation for poor decisions and lower disposable income is higher than the contrary.

Wealthy by all means have the ability to wager more than they can afford. Often times, they wager significantly higher than average income individuals; however, they stay within their means

> A quarter of bettors can’t pay a bill because of their wagers, a third have gambling debts, more than half carry credit card debts, and a quarter of them are afraid they can’t control their gambling.

No way. It's almost like these are addictive products being engineered to be as addictive as possible and deliberately punch people's brains in such a way to make them stay. That's so weird.