This has to end with DraftKings owing their users a fuckton of money, right? How do you just leave people who spent tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars on this out in the cold?
The massive legalization of online betting is a societal cancer. We’re going to find out in like 10 years that it’s the single largest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the ultra-wealthy in this country’s history. The proliferation of casinos outside of AC & Vegas such that they are now like 30 minutes outside of every population center is also really bad.
I dunno, we have a link in another thread about the owner/CEO of a hospital that was losing money in his bat-infested hospitals with inoperable health-code violating kitchens and broken ACs in 100-degree heat paying himself a cool quarter billion a year, then filing for bankruptcy for the hospitals.
I recently heard about (and confirmed via LA Times) a billionaire LA landlord systematically keeping all the security deposits from his tenants on made up repair claims for years until finally getting sued - it was a multi-billionaire literally stealing millions from poor and middle class people.
Late stage capitalism, or maybe the better term is post-regulatory capitalism, is a disaster allowing the worst sociopaths to become the biggest winners. We have literal robber barons stealing from the middle/working class and government.
So I highly doubt that online betting will be the single largest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the ultra-wealthy. It’s also a chance for some of the middle/working class who don’t have another path to climb to hop in the ring and be +EV if they’re sharp enough and battle their way up in poker or sports betting.
It’s also worth noting that Draft Kings lost $4.935 billion over the last four years. The battle for customers is so fierce that the online sportsbooks are often losing money on huge promos.
So you are changing your take to “on a percentage basis…”
Gambling in any form doesn’t even come close to 1% management fees being charged on people’s 401ks for the past 30 years, for profit colleges, lack of single payer/public option, and on and on.
I’m not buying that, where online gambling is legal, it represents anything close to .5 percent of the wealth being transferred from the poors to the rich even if it is only .5 percent of GDP (and I’m accepting, for arguments sake, that this figure is true).
Gambling is a tiny part of the global economy. You are lacking a sense of relative scale. The idea that whether it’s legal or not moves the needle whatsoever in wealth inequality is…
Some of those stats about bankruptcy/etc seemed compelling the needle is moving. I agree with you that still doesn’t make it the largest societal issue
A minuscule nearly non-existent chance in the long run. I think you’re skewed here because you’re a +EV poker player and do it for a living, but man, you’re a unicorn. You’ve got to represent like less than a tenth of a percent of the people who are gambling in all forms, maybe several orders of magnitude less than even that in the Venn Diagram of all gamblers.
I mean yeah I’m definitely biased, I think the main reason I bristle at this is that in America in 2024 there’s a 0.0% chance that any of the broken stuff in our society that made poker my best choice is getting fixed. But there’s a non-zero chance various forms of gambling get banned.
Most places that have online sports betting also have online slots and blackjack. I wonder if that’s factored into the study.
So apparently the Trump clan is launching another crypto scam (with Barron as the “visionary”) but before they launched someone hacked one of their accounts and started pumping a different scam token?
Man, it’s going to be super tilting if Ellison gets absolutely no prison time:
Like, yeah, I get it, she cooperated, but a low level drug dealer who cooperates against the distributer is still going in for some amount of time, and what she did was so much worse and harmed so many more people.
