Krugman looks into crypto and finds that Crypto is for Criming (and, also, speculation — the graph above shows how sports betting has also surged in the last few years). He also explains why banks won’t get into it.
Senator Andy Kim has a thread on twitter about him going out to look for drones, and finding planes. He went with police and civilian pilots. (I could only see the first post on twitter until I logged in, but whatever, that’s how broken that place is.). He’s trying to demonstrate what a sane public servant does when people are upset about something, in sharp contrast to Larry Hogan.
Here’s a gift link to Dan Pfeiffer’s latest MessageBox newsletter, showing that 1% of Americans polled think that pardoning the January 6 defendants should be Trump’s first priority when he gets into office. It’s definitely an opportunity for Democrats to roll tape on some of the violence that’s gotten memory holed.
New Deal democrat
Because in gambling, the house always wins (with the exception of the Orange One’s Atlantic City casinos), the surge in sports betting means the great vacuuming out of paychecks from ordinary people’s pockets – you know, the money for the kids’ clothing and such.
There’s a reason gambling used to be banned almost everywhere. It is yet another lesson that the US will have to learn from scratch.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Is this the first time Krugs has written about this? If so, well duh. That wins the Claude Rains Memorial Gambling Awareness Award with a coveted 4-Claude rating.
I read a piece I can’t find now on how another level of the crypto grift, particularly in the Pacific NW, is how it benefits from relatively cheap hydro-electric power, ie., lower ‘lectricity rates.
Sure enough, you look at the national kWh average rate of 16.5 cents, then go to Washington state where it’s currently 9.79 cents.
Whenever the Electricity Uber Alles crowd here talks about massive conversion, I always ask them, where is the sourcing coming from? That’s particularly true when one sees what AI is gonna do much less the krypto klowns when combined with utility company’s dislike of any significant growth of residential solar (as in “I put power back into the grid”, meaning it cuts into their profits).
As it is, earlier in the year, 7 states that were gonna phase out their coal plants are either rethinking that or spreading out the shutdown many years longer than planned because of activities just like these.
Fair Economist
The enormous amount of money to be made if only certain unpaid players don’t accomplish certain things creates a massive incentive for cheating – and lo and behold we get an incredibly bizarre football season.
It’s going to get much worse as betting grows and the systems for bribing players develop. If this isn’t stopped, college football is going to become a complete sham. Professional won’t be much better – the very top talent makes a lot, but 90%+ make less than a middle manager.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
For a really deep dive into 2023 “gaming” numbers overall:
https://www.americangaming.org/resources/aga-commercial-gaming-revenue-tracker/
Traditional casino gaming still rules the gambling world but it’s clear we’re in a transitional period of some kind.
WereBear
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Even our vices are becoming more convenient?
Jeffg166
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Not the first time he wrote about this.
The GQP is proposing backing bitcoin with a 100 billion guarantee while also proposing to do away with the FDIC.
The party of fiscal responsibility.
Omnes Omnibus
The 2024 minimum salary is $795,000. Admittedly it is is not guaranteed money. But it’s not bad fir someone in their 20s.
catclub
There is an extremely long read in ‘Bits about Money’on this. I have mentioned it before. I found it fascinating.It ended with ‘what does Crypto want’ ( from the Trump admin and regulators).A lot of leeway.https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunking/
BellyCat
But…but, that 1%: Are they the top 1%?!?!
catclub
Krugman’s version leaves out of lot of the key bits I found fascinating about … bank regulation.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Jeffg166:
The asteroid can’t hit soon enough.
Kinda makes one wonder how krypto would fare if we had some kind of massive grid shutdown. The sorta thing engineered by a strategic opponent.
“All that stupid electricity money you got there, shame if something happened to it.”
catclub
It is not already? Scholar athletes??
Victor Matheson
@New Deal democrat: Yeah, every dollar the house wins comes from one place only. That being said, we are talking about roughly $40 per adult per year and revenues will definitely flatten out rapidly now that most states have legalized.
And it is likely that at least some of this gambling activity was already occurring underground, so I don’t have this a one of the most pressing regulatory concerns in the US.
catclub
which tells me that there are lots of people who don’t gamble at all.
Cigarette sales were more than 5 times that, and we know a lot of people who don’t smoke.
Victor Matheson
@Fair Economist: I disagree. I think the economics (under, for example, the Becker crime model) suggests that corruption should be fairly rare in the pro sports where the prospect of losing multi-million dollar contracts should keep most of the players honest. And legalized betting markets make catching cheaters more likely.
The chances are higher in college football, but professionalization will reduce the problems, and betting markets are pretty thin once you get below the top games making market manipulation easier to catch.
I worry about the problem gamblers, but I don’t worry much about sport manipulation.
Miss Bianca
@New Deal democrat: One of the things I could never get used to when reading both history *and* historical romance novels set back in earlier centuries was how much everybody seemed to gamble! Not just the upper crust gaming away their entire fortunes on cards and dice, but poor folk also on things like cock-fighting, prize fighting, horse racing, etc.
I have a fairly addictive personality, I think, considering how difficult it appears for me to give up my favorite vices like sugar, coffee, etc, but one thing I’ve never been addicted to, thank God, was gambling.
A line I read when I was ten years old always stuck with me about gambling, and maybe it helped develop a risk-averse personality that way: “Shit, man, it’s like flushing your money down a toilet and hoping some of it floats back up.”
UncleEbeneezer
Samantha Hancox-Li puts into words something I’ve been feeling for quite some time. Social Justice is great, but the social justice game, is not:
matt
Up to now I had neglected the tax evasion idea, but on reflection I’d guess that’s the biggest application by far of cryptocurrency in the US.
Victor Matheson
@catclub: Right, the $40/year is losses, not total bets made. Total bets made are more like $500/year. And that distribution is hugely skewed.
The last number I had was that 50% of the gambling is done by 5% of the population, but I wasn’t sure if that was 50% of the gambling is done by 5% of the betting population or the population overall.
Kelly
I just saw a bald eagle flying by over the river
catclub
umm, 1)there has already been a pro Tennis gambling scandal recently. 2) I would think that even occasional corruption would do bad things to reputations of the leagues. 3) which pro sports? Women’s basketball has pretty meager salaries. also women’s Hockey.
Victor Matheson
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah, I assume Fair Economist was talking about the salary of D1 Power 4 football players, not NFL guys. NFL guys are generally making way too much money nowadays to make them easy to bribe, and way beyond what a normal person would call “middle manager.”
College athletes are definitely more susceptible which is why the NCAA is the one major sports entity in the US that hasn’t gone all in on gambling.
Victor Matheson
@catclub: Gambling markets pretty thin for WNBA and NWSL making it hard to hide large, unusual bets.
And yeah, every sport will have scandals, but they are likely to be minor. I mean, Jontay Porter has been kicked out of the NBA. Calvin Ridley the same in the NFL. But these are extremely minor players. It is wildly unlikely that we will see Patrick Mahomes/LeBron James type players involved in gambling scandals (unlike the Shoeless Joe Jackson/Black Sox scandal a century ago).
Barbara
@Victor Matheson: It appears to me that the most vulnerable sports are likely those that have already had betting scandals — non-team professional sports where there is one league and a very large discrepancy between the biggest winners and everyone else. Which is to say, professional tennis.
Basically, players in the lower echelons of the sport are liable to tank performance in lower level matches because they can make more money by gambling than they can by winning. Since it’s an individual sport their level of effort and overall performance is obviously within their control, and they don’t account to others if their performance is subpar. I would not discount the pull of team dynamics in preventing all but the most discontented, outlier or indebted teammates from trying to engineer a loss.
I also think there is a lot of potential corruption in the enterprise of odds making as the individual types of bets become more numerous and more discrete — who decides what the odds are of such and such a team being ahead at the end of the third quarter? What is that based on? And what are the circumstances in which the entity can refuse to make good on a bet? Apparently state law varies, but there are documented instances in which people have been refused big payouts because the odds making was considered to be unsupported. Of course, they don’t return the money if you lost your side of the bet only if they have to pay out a lot more than they anticipated.
One of my subsistence jobs in college was working a lottery machine. I learned all I needed to know about the futility of gambling from that.
ETA: Apparently there is also a lot of betting on professional golf, but it seems like players would find it more difficult to engineer overall performance results. However, if people are betting on individual holes — the likelihood of getting a four on five par hole — it would be easier. At least one player thinks that some fan behavior can be attributed to trying to influence their bets on how someone would perform on a specific hole.
catclub
It is interesting to note that all the processors designed for crypto mining are pretty close to what is needed for AI processing.
I would say this is in contrast to the 1990’s internet boom that left huge amounts of fiber unused (and uneconomical) for decades.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Same issue in the finger lakes of NY with a supposedly only during peak times gas power plant where crypto wanted to co locate a data center. That got stopped, thankfully.
eclare
https://bsky.app/profile/adamkinzinger.bsky.social/post/3ldewqwszpk2q
Kinzinger on drones.
catclub
and then there is Pete Rose. also more recently, wasn’t there a translator for one of the Japanese import baseball stars who was gambling addict?
Matt McIrvin
@UncleEbeneezer: This is kind of what we were talking about in the other thread about drama addicts, the progressive version. Some of it is a kind of one-upmanship.
Fair warning, though: whenever people get into this kind of analysis, the discussion gets corrupted because the right always, ALWAYS jumps in and adopts it as a hammer to bash anyone left of John Foster Dulles with. That’s what “political correctness” was about, “SJWs”, “cancel culture” etc.
Matt McIrvin
@Barbara: I wonder to what extent the moral panic about trans athletes is either motivated by all this or serving as a distraction from it. I understand that the emotions people develop around sports can get them amazingly worked up about anything that might be “cheating” regardless, but it’s all the more if they have money riding on it.
Gin & Tonic
So first Justin Trudeau goes to Mar a Lago to kiss Trump’s, um, ass, and now he forces the resignation of his vocally anti-Trump and (coincidentally?) Ukrainian-Canadian Finance Minister, Chrystia Freeland. There will be no resistance from the north, I see.
Barbara
@catclub: I should have added, “or sociopaths or just garden variety gambling addicts.”
I read about the scandal with the translator, but I don’t think the translator has direct influence over how someone plays.
Miss Bianca
@UncleEbeneezer: Well, shucks. Between this article and that other one you posted recently, looks like I am going to have to pay attention to Liberal Currents.
Kay
Gambling should have remained illegal. Another one of my unpopular political opinions.
I love watching the explosion and thinking “no, no harm will come from THAT, no sir”
We are the most gullible people in the world.
UncleEbeneezer
@Matt McIrvin: There is often a tiny kernel of real truth in whatever log of shit the Right espouses. Of course they will take a bad faith approach on this, like any other topic. But having spent a lot of time in Social Justice spaces for the past decade, everything Hancox-Li writes here absolutely resonates with what I’ve witnessed and even participated in. And it doesn’t stay confined to those spaces and can have disastrous effects on tight-margin elections, imo.
TONYG
Sports betting (really any kind of gambling) and cryptocurrency “investing” are really the same thing — a way for stupid people to give their money to smarter, richer people. The fact that both of these activities are proliferating now says a lot about the deteriorating state of our “society”.
UncleEbeneezer
@Miss Bianca: I was just thinking the same thing. Don’t know much about it, but both articles are really superb.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: To say that all of these cowards are a disappointment is a huge understatement.
rikyrah
@Kelly:
Cool
Miss Bianca
@Kay: Yeah, you’re probably right. We as a society have become so tax-averse that we’ll justify anything the same society used to ban – like gambling, or cannabis consumption – on the grounds that we can tax the shit out of *that* and apply “sin taxes” to basic infrastructure. Like, in Colorado, taxes on recreational cannabis products are supposed to go to school construction. It’s always given me a kind of bitter kick to go, “oh, so you want more school upgrades? – smoke more dope, normies!”
Kay
“Gambling bankruptcies” are a whole separate area now. I figure they will eventually exceed bankruptcy driven by medical debt.
Good going everyone. We promoted and carefully nurtured this completely predatory industry that returns no value to anyone other than the owners.
Glory b
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/05/why-this-computer-scientist-says-all-cryptocurrency-should-die-in-a-fire
WaterGirl
@Kay:
Absolutely. What the fuck were they thinking? The inmates are running the asylum.
Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog
@catclub: If you’re the one who linked to this a few days ago, thank you. Yes, it’s a long piece, but very worthwhile IMO.
E.
I was at a conference a few weeks ago where the CEO of Tennessee Valley Authority said he wants to build 30 new nuclear plants by 2035 to accommodate crypto and AI. He was grinning ear to ear whenever the subject of Trump came up. These people are madmen. They are not socially adjusted and they are going to get us all killed. That CEO makes $12 million a year.
Old Man Shadow
I’m not an economist, but having more and more of our economy spent on gambling and illegal interests to the point where the crooks can buy the government seems like a bad thing.
WaterGirl
@Kay:
I doubt that anyone here promoted or nurtured the gamboling industry.
The powers that be did that.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Kelly:
https://flic.kr/p/2qAegrD
Ohio Mom
For some reason, discussions about bitcoin bring to my mind Ithaca dollars. Ithaca being of course the small college town in upstate New York that is one of those places time forgot, where the counter-culture lives on.
The idea of Ithaca dollars was to encourage local spending and build community. It was somewhere between an alternative currency and barter. I babysit your kids, you give me Ithaca dollars that I use at the farmer’s market, etc.
Needless to say, this effort petered out. I am not sure of the moral of this story, except that maybe that crime (as in Bitcoin) is a more robust foundation for alternative currencies than idealism.
The Audacity of Krope
That’s just industry.
E.
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: It’s really true. Excited every single time. Thank you Richard Nixon for banning DDT.
laura
@Kay: sports betting and the huge advertising campaign in favor of- I hear the Jaws theme music playing in my head. I think this this is going to just destroy lives all over, and mostly the lives of young men. This could actually be a legit complaint about how shitty life is for young men, but instead they are embracing the gaming lifestyle and just not seeing the danger and the potential for devestation. Just my 2 cents.
Matt McIrvin
@UncleEbeneezer: What her discussion reminds me of is something not really political at all, a video Technology Connections posted about the danger of “but sometimes!”–there’s a technical improvement that there are many excellent reasons to adopt, but people object to it because there’s some corner case where it would have some kind of weakness or cause a problem. Even though, if you really look into it, that corner case has an easy workaround or the problem is not that severe.
Every change has tradeoffs, and if progress ever happens it’s a matter of balancing those tradeoffs and finding some kind of compromise, and this is not an easy process. Sometimes, we get railroaded by the desire for change for change’s sake into accepting tradeoffs that we shouldn’t. But it’s also possible for everything to get bogged down by the refusal to accept any, such that nothing happens at all.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Glory b:
The Audacity of Krope
I thought we made alternate currency illegal back when companies would pay workers in currency only usable at the company store.
What happened?
TBone
@Kelly: thank you for sharing that. Fly, Eagles, Fly is not merely a football cheer. They came back from the brink, and so can we. Plus that one that almost bit Donold is the .gif that keeps on giving.
I just can’t bring myself to be dour about anything (well, almost anything) right now, although the temptation is always there.
Kay
@WaterGirl:
They’re all Right wing donors too. Trump’s sing!e biggest donor is in the gambling industry.
Spanky
@Kelly: May it become as common for you as it has for us in the Chesapeake Region.
Kay
@laura:
Agree 100%. I agree young men are struggling. But I also believe young men have agency just like young women do and the longer we tell them that none of their problems are their fault the worse it will get. They need to save themselves, and they can. There is plenty available for them to work with (but work they must). But not if we keep telling them their problems are the fault of other people getting ahead.
The Audacity of Krope
Who are “we?”
Captain C
@New Deal democrat:
I still can’t figure out why this wasn’t a large part of both Clinton’s and Harris’ campaigns, as part of a larger message that TCFG is a shit businessman. Three bankrupted casinos (and an entire football league run into the ground by TCFG’s bad decisions) should have been hammered into the public consciousness. ‘Dangerous Donald’ can make him seem appealing in a villainous sort of way, but ‘Deadbeat Donald’ knocks the cornerstone out of any ‘I’m so good at business I should be running this country’ argument coming from his side.
Remember, when he was roasted, he vetoed jokes about his net worth being lower than he claimed, but was fine with jokes about him wanting to or actually humping Ivanka (who seems to have disappeared lately).
Kelly
@TBone:
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
@rikyrah:
Looking out my back door. I saw a pair of bald eagles last week. We’ve had a pair show up in the neighborhood around this time of the year for quite a while. I suspect they are the same pair but mature bald eagles all look the same to me. Most years I’ll see an immature bald eagle as well. I don’t know if it’s last years chick of just another young eagle looking for a territory. The youngsters are great to see. As I child I thought bald eagles would go extinct.
Barbara
@Kay: The economics of gambling make the most sense for people who are truly marginalized — but these aren’t, by and large, the people who engage in gambling. Basically, if your prospects are so dim that you might as well roll the dice then it’s hard to argue with at least playing the lottery — compared to people who actually have at least some disposable income to invest in “real” assets. Diverting that kind of money into gambling (or crypto) is virtually guaranteed to make you worse off. This isn’t a mysterious or hard to understand fact. It’s how casinos and all true gambling enterprises stay in business.
Professor Bigfoot
@Miss Bianca: When I was a naive 13 year old I had 50 cents on me and decided to join the older kids in their after-school crap game.
I lost everything within 5 minutes.
Have been a non-gambler ever since.
WereBear
Making things illegal is not easy and drives activity underground where it can’t be monitored.
Prohibition was a disaster. Many medical uses for cannabis.
But that’s why we have casinos. Putting it on our phones will do for our wallets what Door Dash did to waistlines.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Kelly:
Since you posted above, I’ve been trying to find photos of Bald Eagles I took back when we owned the B&B in Central Misery.
We were right along the Osage River and in the winter when the water levels got real low, we’d get a dozen or so eagles out in the mud flats, squawking and playing.
It took 20 years of living there to see in real time how the population rebounded and they started returning to their former range year round.
Now, first time I went to Juneau AK, Bald Eagles there are as numerous as pigeons are in a big city. They’d hang around dumpsters to scavenge, half a dozen would sit on a light pole, etc.
And yeah, all those years of seeing them in MO, it *never* got old. We even tracked the two active nests in the county. Used every year, probably by the same pair(s).
Kelly
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Our home sits about 50 feet above the river so quite a few of my eagle sightings the birds are at eye level and a couple hundred feet away.
Several summer ago, from my back porch, I watched an eagle trying to steal a fish from a osprey. The osprey could turn tighter than the eagle. Round and round they rose and drifted upriver out of sight. Don’t know who ended up with the fish.
Kay
@Barbara:
Its already lousy with lobbyists. They’re entrenched now and they have a business any moron could run that prints money.
Expect deregulation to continue.
trollhattan
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
At one of myriad kid soccer matches, in a break in the action I peered skyward and saw what I assumed were crows harassing a hawk far overhead. Took some photos and returned to the fierce on-field contest.
When I finally got around to processing the images I saw my hawk was a golden eagle and the crows were a pair if kites. Hot raptor-on-raper action and holy hell, are golden eagles big things.
We’re in a migration zone but don’t get a lot of raptors sticking around, so it’s always a treat to see some, whatever the type. Now Canada geese, those we’ve got.
Kay
Fetterman is going to switch parties. He is now enthusiastically endorsing half the Trump appointees.
This has to be Top Ten of “complete frauds in politics”. He’s a Right winger.
AWOL
@New Deal democrat: It’s not just a US problem. Watch overseas sporting events and see that they’re drenched with betting ads. We’re not the only sick, greedy nation in the world.
Despite how obnoxious gambling is and how annoying the broadcasts are that pump gambling during game broadcasts, at least it’s out in the open instead of it being just a gambler/illegal bookie dance.
As for how many games are fixed, well, we’ll never know.
Captain C
@WereBear: I’ve read several other places that while it’s probably best to legalize gambling to keep it away from organized crime, it should absolutely have to be done in person at a casino or licensed sportsbook, to at least make it not so ridiculously easy to fritter away your savings and kids’ college accounts from your smartphone.
Captain C
@Kay:
Which makes TCFG a sub-moron as he bankrupted three casinos back when there wasn’t competition from Native American casinos and online sports books.
Captain C
@AWOL:
I don’t think it’s quite half the English soccer teams that are sponsored by gambling companies, but it sure seems like it these days.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: I’ve gotten dinged here before for suspecting something is off about that guy. Oh well.
TBone
@Kelly: 💜
I’ve seen them up close fishing on Penns Creek – true magic
Betty
@WaterGirl: they were being heavily and constantly lobbied. Campaign donations, etc.
Trivia Man
@Miss Bianca: my own theory is that a few things have the capacity to suck up infinite money – gambling, politics, and starting a business. Very tantalizing to just… a …. Little …. More and SUCCESS!!!
AWOL
@Captain C: Another humorous thing is that FanDuel and other gambling companies are now broadcasting sporting events.
But “fandom” and entertainment are not why sports exist. For centuries, sports was purely for gambling. Boxing, horse racing, etc. Up until the late 1950s, the highest drawing TV show was “Friday Night Fights.” Scorsese’s classic, “Raging Bull” is set during this era.
Gambling and other money obsessions are generally right-wing fetishes. I’m fine with stupid people losing money.
Betty
@Matt McIrvin: I could be wrong, but I suspect the stroke severely affected his judgment. He recently had a car accident while he was driving at a really excessive speed. The change in his position on a number of things has changed dramatically.
NotMax
@Trivia Man
Ever owned a boat? Or a British sports car?
;)
Gin & Tonic
Gambling/lotteries: a tax on people who don’t understand math.
MobiusKlein
@Kelly:
I’m in a “suburban” part of San Francisco, and saw a Marsh Hawk maybe 30 feet away diving into a bush, chasing some sparrows. I’ve seen those guys a bunch of times over the years. I’ve loved WFH for the bird watching part
MobiusKlein
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Not every crypto-currency is as wasteful as Bitcoin. (and yeah, that’s damning with faint praise)
From the inside, I can tell you there are a lot of other crypto things going on that aim to avoid the intractable nature of bitcoin, and it’s likely those alternatives will expand into wider use in 2025-2028.
E.g. killing off bank to bank Wire Transfers.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
I was amused at his singular focus on lobbying the US for more war crimes in Gaza. Is that really top of mind for his (supposed) base in western Pennsylvania – the “forgotten” white working class want more Palestinian children killed? News to me and I spend a lot of time with them.
Legal weed and pushing for more dead Palestinian children. That seems to be the only work he does in the Senate.
Soprano2
@New Deal democrat: They made sports betting legal in MO in the last election. I voted against it because I think it’s not only a huge scourge on people’s paychecks, it’s bad for sports too. I’ve read about players getting death threats because they didn’t perform in a certain way that caused someone to lose a lot of money. So, bad in general.
E.
@Kay: I’ve been wondering too but chalked it up to disinformation until recently and then the Gaza thing was so disappointing. In a way I will be relieved if it’s stroke-related because then it won’t be yet another of my political miscalculations.
Victor Matheson
@Kay: I definitely agree that the big gambling outfits will try to keep regulations out as much as possible.
That being said, it’s actually a tough business. Both DraftKings and FanDuel are either losing money or just scraping by in most quarters by conventional accounting measures.
The Audacity of Krope
@E.: Just to point out, Fetterman’s black neighbor hunt occurred before his stroke. He’s been more than a little sus for a while.
Soprano2
@Kay: I’ve watched people sit at machines we have that show you the chance of winning before you start playing. People will put a lot of money in those machines. That’s part of why I’m not enthusiastic about legalizing gambling
We have to get rid of the machines by the end of the year because our city has outlawed them, and they’re threatening your liquor license if you have them after the first of the year. We don’t make that much off of them anyway. The city outlawed them because “casinos” with hundreds of those machines in them sprang up here, which was not supposed to happen.
The Audacity of Krope
If they’re like the right-wingier white working class base in Massachusetts; actually, yes.
TBone
I’m not pro or con right now, but I’m gonna see what he does and not pay too much attention to the same MSM treatment which tore President Biden down. I’m certainly not going to lob Molotov cocktails at him. He’s still on our team, vote wise.
We are not a hard blue state, we are just hard.
I’m also making nice with everyone IRL here, btw. Regardless. ‘Tis the season. Come January, that may very well change.
Another Scott
@Gin & Tonic: It’s also a sign that too many people at the bottom are struggling and the government has little or no interest in helping them.
In the late ’70s I went with a friend to the horse track in Lebanon, OH a few times. Trotters and pacers and sulkies and all that stuff (horses pulled a cart with the jockey, rather than riding directly on the horse).
My friend learned how to read the racing form, how to figure out which horses were better at closing, etc., from his dad.
It was a thoroughly depressing place. Lots of old men, and young men who were burnt out and looked 20-30 years older than their age, trying to figure out a way – any way – to make some money. Lots and lots of little losing betting slips scattered everywhere.
And of course, the horses were badly treated and were usually doped up on various things. And jockeys had systems for boxing in favorites to mess with the winning payouts.
It was not a good place.
High above most of the action, there were some glassed-in stands and seats, for folks with money to bet and watch without having to mix with the commoners.
My fried won about $1800 once, picking the magic combination for 3 consecutive races. He left instantly after collecting his winnings. It does happen, like getting hit by lightning happens…
Sports betting is a bad thing. It invites corruption – maybe – maybe – not by the top athletes, but by the refs and officials and hangers on and lower-ranked players and teams. It should not be tied in with the leagues and teams – it needs to be hands-off. It being tied in with media is a bad thing (the Tennis Channel is always hyping betting lines these days), but I’m not sure what can be done about that. Most of all, it needs to be regulated and fans need to have some independent assurance that they’re watching legitimate competition, but how that can be done with international sports and media is beyond me.
LA Olympics 2028 bought to you by FanDuel!!
:-/
FWIW.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Soprano2
I wish you could debate some of these people I’ve heard interviewed who write whole books about this stuff. Never does the interviewer ask them “How come young women aren’t suffering in this way? In the 1950’s school was a lot stricter about behavior, yet you didn’t see young men suffering in school then. What’s changed?” Because they don’t want to admit that part of what’s changed is that too many of these young men have been sold a load of bullshit that they shouldn’t have to compete with anyone else in order to be successful, that it’s the fault of women and minorities that they can’t get ahead.
Soprano2
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: We get bald eagles here around Lake Springfield in the winter, but I’ve never seen them except in pictures.
The Audacity of Krope
@TBone: Fetterman supports the nation’s embrace of Islamophobia and his rhetoric endangers our student protestors right alongside Gazans, albeit not nearly to the same degree.
Basic security and respect for our fellow human beings go farther than other needs. So fuck him and his support for other D priorities.
Soprano2
@Kay: I wonder if the stoke he had has something to do with this.
Soprano2
@Captain C: It’s not just that, either. It’s rare that anyone puts money in the jukebox at the bar – they all buy songs from an app on their phones. I guarantee you they spend more money on it than they would if they had to put money in it.
Miss Bianca
@Soprano2: Hmm, maybe that’s why I don’t use any “pay for *this* now!” apps on my phone except for…my phone plan. It’s too easy for me right *now* to make questionable spending decisions, I don’t need to make it any easier!
Kay
@Soprano2:
The whole Biden Boom I was telling them to get into an apprenticeship because they were all adding apprentices. The Biden Boom is over. They spent 4 years whining about feminists and affirmative action and now no one is taking apprentices.
They are going to have to share the world with other people. I’m sorry that they thought they were entitled to success because they are white and male, but that is a lie.
Martin
@laura: Yep. All of this stuff is directed at men. $50B a year in sports betting losses adds up. It’s also directed at men, by men – fintech, memestocks, crypto, etc. Either by billionaires or techbros.
The theory I think holds best here is that a lot of men feel the American dream no longer exists – originating largely from 2008. The perception is that working hard doesn’t pay off and you need to do all of this crap to get ahead. FIRE is also big among young men and women – Financial Independence Retire Early. Basically, make big money and nope out of the system as soon as you can.
Barbara
@Martin: You have to be seriously deluded to think that sports gambling increases your opportunity for FIRE.
Martin
@Soprano2: One problem with discrimination is that sometimes the people being discriminated against overcome the hurdles and reset the standard, and the people doing the discriminating are now uncompetitive.
In our work trying to understand the gender imbalances at universities, we never got enough time to focus on why men and women perceived things differently. Our overall takeaway was that men weren’t that much less competitive for college admission than women, but their perception for where they were competitive was badly flawed and that resulted in them missing out on opportunities. Now, high schools have tools to help students understand where they are competitive, and the men weren’t internalizing that information. We had some data suggesting they didn’t trust it – that the educational system was trying to hold them back, where the women didn’t feel that way.
But we know from our own history that access to educational opportunities were deliberately undermining women, and while we removed those structural barriers, women generally also rose to overcome them as if they were still there. Men didn’t do that and women pulling the standards up (because access to education is competitive – the system we desire to have) left the men behind to some degree.
And I think it’s a bit harder for men to internalize this change because it’s a change that men generally implemented. So many of scams targeting men are initiated by men. The competitive nature of higher education is a system that men continually reinforce in ways that women do not.
Martin
@Barbara: I will direct your attention to the world of sports betting arbitrage where you can pretty much guarantee you won’t lose money. Find differentiated odds at different betting sites and choose opposites sides of the bet at each and exploit the odds differential. It’s a lot of work to find these opportunities, doesn’t pay out very well, but you can grind it out 16 hours a day, 7 days a week and you can increase your bet size so that it does pay out a lot, even at low odds.
Martin
@Barbara: I will note a common feature of all of these systems – being confident that you are smarter than the people on the other end of the system, which is rarely the case. For some reason this seems to be a predominantly male thing.
That is a necessary component for all of the betting/crypto/memestock systems to work and also matches what we see in college admissions.
Barbara
@Martin: I will take your word for it, and simply note that the time and effort required not to lose money would make sports gambling basically a full-time occupation, and the questions you have to ask yourself are (1) are you going to be better at it than others? and (2) is there something else you are better at that would give you higher odds at a comparable or better return? And maybe those questions are unanswerable for the majority of people. Maybe the better way to ask the question is, how good are you at probability and statistics?
Maybe it’s the media world — the ready availability of examples of people who seem to have effortlessly made an early fortune that makes it seem common and doable, but if you actually look at who gets to be a millionaire, the vast majority of people are those who plod along, live below their means and invest what they save.
Barbara
@Martin: I have told my daughters that studies show that men looking for a job will apply if they have even half the skills listed as “required,” whereas women assume that they need all the skills. Now, you aren’t investing much by applying for a job so that level of optimism in my view is more than justified. My point being to them was to just apply even if they think it’s a long shot because there is so little to lose. But if, as with college admissions, you actually had to pay a significant amount of money just to apply, then you need to perhaps be more discerning about the likelihood of success. I think that with sports gambling many men think that it’s more important to be savvier about sports than it is to be savvier about probability and logical outcomes.
Gravenstone
@Kay: I just shake my head at MLB partnering with one of the major gambling sites. Yet they still hold the actions of the 1919 Black Sox as anathema and worthy of lifetime bans for multiple participants. Only a matter of time before the next Black Sox are upon us.
wenchacha
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: My daughter worked on a fish tender boats in Sitka for a summer. She said the nearest airport had to shoo the bald eagles off the runway.
RevRick
@Miss Bianca: Both of my grandfathers were gamblers. They both had steady jobs and income through the Great Depression, earning above average wages. My maternal grandfather was constantly betting on get-rich stock schemes and essentially died broke. My paternal grandfather bet of the ponies, and often took me as a child to his bookie who ran a newspaper/magazine store.
@Victor Matheson: Most bars are kept afloat by alcoholics. The 5% is probably accurate, a second-level iteration of Pareto’s Law, which observes that 80% of the effects are due to 20% of the causes. The financial meltdown that led to the Great Recession was caused by a mere 4-5% of all mortgages going worthless.
Martin
@Barbara: Yeah, it’s definitely full time – but you have agency, which traditional jobs don’t give you.
I’ll note, I had the safest career path – public sector worker with pension, and a pretty successful one as well in terms of career path. If it wasn’t for my investments, I’d still be priced out of my own community. That’s a problem that my kids see, and they’re compensating for. And that I think is the real problem with the economy – the thing we’re supposed to do – get a stable 9-5 and work your way up, doesn’t work for most people, and the next generation has internalized that.
Martin
@Barbara: The problem with applying to college isn’t the application cost, which isn’t that bad. The problem is that it’s a limited opportunity. If you don’t apply to a school that is going to admit you within the window, you’re off to the community college as that’s the only option left. If you apply to the wrong jobs, you can just keep applying and adapting as you go. The stakes of failure are a lot lower in that sense.
Kayla Rudbek
@Martin: men tend to be wilder gamblers than women because women’s gambling urges are met by dating, marriage, and childbirth in my opinion. The average woman has to take into account that a given man and/or childbirth may be fatal to her, but the average man generally doesn’t worry about getting killed by his wife or girlfriend.
Kayla Rudbek
@Barbara: same thing with filing patent applications, it’s a very male-dominated system in terms of inventors, examiners, and patent attorneys/agents (exact percentages will vary by technical field, there are more women on the biotech side as opposed to the computer science side)