The deluge of gambling ads on TV during Friday night footy is absolutely appalling. There’s a very robust conduit for normalising sports gambling through advertisements around the broadcasts and it’s clearly influencing young adults. I’ve noticed a dramatic uptick in how common it is compared to when I was that age.
An argument I've heard is that by legalizing betting, it can be more easily monitored with regulation and reduce the amount of black market betting. People still bet when it's illegal, it just becomes harder to track, which makes it easier for gamblers to interfere with outcomes without detection.
It sounds kind of similar to the legalization of certain recreational drugs. For example, alcohol prohibition resulted in a massive black market with organized criminal gangs, and many places realized it's better to regulate it rather than prohibit it.
I think for gambling, we need better regulations, and the Australian government seems to think so too.
Almost nobody was betting in the black market before the legalization. Sure you obviously had some people, but friction was big enough where it was not worth it. Right now, there isn’t a single game where people are talking about the bets they made in NA.
Nothing should be black and white. Even for alcohol and drug abuse, we should look at each and evaluate.
I don't know about Australia but there was an enormous amount of black market sports gambling in the USA before it was widely legalized. People who were unaware of this were just oblivious or led very sheltered lives. Broad legalization may have been a net negative for society but it's a complex issue.
define enormous? before it was legalized I knew one mate that was a gambler. I don’t have a friend anymore who does not sports gamble, hardly have relatives that don’t sports gamble. die-hard fans of teams now don’t give a hoot if the team wins (especially in the regular season)… not saying this is not a complicated issue but to say market was enormous is very much removed from reality
Yep it's hard to build a large liquid market for both sides of the bet without a central platform being legal. Look at polymarket as another example of things that people wouldn't bet on if a (legal in some countries) platform didn't exist.
Very few people gambled illegally. Putting some gangster out of business (Lol if you actually believe that) at the cost of addicting the entire working class to throwing away their money is bad math!
Illegal gambling has been rife for a very long time - the bookie down the pub taking bets on horses, games, whatever
Add to that that the Costigan Commission (1984) and the Fitzgerald Inquiry (1989) proved that illegal gambling was the foundational "river of gold" for organised crime in Australia.
But your original claim was 'very few gambled illegally' which the historical record contradicts.
The Costigan and Fitzgerald inquiries showed illegal gambling wasn't just widespread - the profits funded other organised crime including the heroin trade.
We can debate whether legalisation was net positive without rewriting that history.
> The race track, it appears, is a great meeting place for criminals. The
Costigan Royal Commission (Australia 1984), the Connor Inquiry (Victoria 1983), the Moffit Royal Commission (New South Wales 1974) and the Fitzgerald Inquiry (Queensland 1989) revealed that a vast network of SP bookmakers exists throughout Australia. They found the monetary flow in the industry huge, and as such has the potential to finance many other illegal activities.
> Mr Justice Moffit warned that there was evidence to indicate that SP syndicates were in contact with major heroin smugglers and domestic drug distributors (New South Wales 1974).
> Connor estimated that the annual turnover for SP bookmaking was $1800 million in New South Wales and $1000 million in Victoria. Connor has said of illegal
bookmaking:
>> Illegal bookmaking is a multimillion dollar industry run by people who can get up to forty or fifty telephones and who, if their telephones are closed
down, can get them in new premises a week later. Illegal bookmakers prosper, making millions of illegal dollars, simply because they do not pay income tax or betting taxes
(Victoria 1983a, vol. 2, ch. 14).[0]
McMillen, J. (1996). "Gambling Cultures: Studies in History and Interpretation."
This academic study explains that SP bookmaking was a "submerged" culture. It operated through "runners" in pubs and massive illegal telephone exchanges. If you weren't a "punter" or part of that specific working-class pub culture, the infrastructure was invisible by design to avoid police detection. (unfortunately I cannot link you to a direct copy - but https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/97802039935... )
Dont be dense, we are talking about "very few" in the context of draft kings which prints more money in 1 week than black market gambling has in years. The turnover in legal sports gambling in america is over 100b a year, this is larger than the gdp of most countries.
my grandma is not going to be looking for a black market bookie. some percentage of people will be no matter what though if you make penalties really severe you will significantly thin out this crowd.
without gambling though, pat mahomes would be making less money that I am making…
> without gambling though, pat mahomes would be making less money that I am making…
It's not like he was broke when it was just beer and crypto ads. He made 10 million dollars his rookie year in the NFL before SCOTUS federally legalized gambling.
Gambling addiction impacts those around the person. They may deprive their dependents of opportunity and care. They may gamble away savings and require further support from the public purse. They may even steal (e.g. taking money from loved ones).
In many non-US countries, we consider the second-order effects due to having inviolable public safety nets. People who are their own victims due to vice are still afforded care because they’re still humans and citizens. That’s why we try to dissuade falling into those vices in the first place.
Meanwhile we keep truly destructive things like alcohol legalized...
For the freedom of normal folks to have 1 beer, 25% of the population is drinking 78% of the consumed alcohol.[1]
And before anyone brings up that myth there is no beneficial dose of alcohol. Even in the pro-wine studies it's been found that the benefit was just the fact it was grapes and that eating/drinking the grapes without fermentation is superior.
As an avid follower of pro CSGO and CS2, I don’t doubt any of that. You’ll note I don’t advocate to ban gambling.
However, vices all come with negative aspects and it’s on us to discuss what the right overall balance is. IMO, when it comes to sports gambling advertisement, it’s way too freely available and normalised.
I’d also like to see a dramatic reduction of pokies (there’s an ABCA article from 2020 that I can’t currently find covering how much money Aussies saved by not being able to play them during lockdown, it’s staggering), but simultaneously fear for the mass closure of sports clubs and other third space venues if it were to happen. It’s a balancing act.
But at least for pokies, they’re deliberately walled away from the restaurant areas, etc. With TV ads, any easily-influenced kid watching their sporting heroes is exposed to this. It’s normalised along watching the sport itself. It’s no surprise there’s a direct conduit from that to young adults having gambling problems.
The ads are going to continue from 8:30pm on, NRL has a game starting at 8pm this evening, the gambling ads will hit just before half time under this new legislation
“TV ads from betting agencies will be capped at three per hour, between 6am and 8:30pm, and banned completely from any live sports broadcasts during those hours”
I read that as even after 8:30pm, they’re still banned during live sports broadcasts. So none of this half-time odds update or whatever.
It translates PDFs for me and gives me a good enough text dump in the console to understand what I’m being told to do. If the PDF is simple enough (a letter, for example). It doesn’t give me a structured English recreation of the PDF.
I’ll give it credit that it’s probably underpinning improved translation in e.g. google translate when I dump a paragraph of English and then copy the Chinese into an email. But that’s not really in the same ballpark.
The only other professional interaction I’ve had with it was when a colleague saw an industry-slang term and asked AI what it meant. The answer, predictably, was incredibly wrong but to his completely naive eyes seemed plausible enough to put in an email. As in, it was a term relating to a metallurgical phenomena observed by a fault and AI found an unrelated industry widget that contained the same term and suggested it was due to the use of said widget.
I don’t even really see the telltale AI writing signs of people using it to summarise documents or whatnot. Nor could I think how I could take what I do and use it to do it faster or more efficiently. So I don’t even think it’s being used to ingest and summarise stuff either.
My hot take: nerds think AI is transformative because nerds build AI to be really good at their niche tech activities.
In my experience, it’s far less useful outside of that. To the point where if AI disappeared tomorrow, it’d make approximately 0 difference to my overall life. I simply don’t find it useful, neither in my professional life nor my personal.
The only repeated use case I’ve found is throwing a PDF at it and asking it to translate the PDF. To its credit, it’s able to now OCR handwriting prior to translating which is nice.
It still doesn’t make a translated PDF. Yes, I know PDF is a shitty proprietary mess of undocumented functions. I don’t care - this is the vaunted AI, it’s apparently eating the entire jobs of programmers. Have it go create and A/B test an entire clean room implementation of the PDF format then.
Now it may be an underlying shim in a feature pipeline with which i interact but thats chasms apart from this “AI is about to eat all of our jobs”. It’s a tuned feature, such as improved translation, in that instance.
My experience from very sporadic use and observation of my colleagues is that, outside of tech, AI is much more of a “go and find the info, summarise it and give me the results” layer to the internet. It’s a slightly more convenient search engine. That’s it.
I’m not 100% sure if this will solve the problem, but I recall that if you open the explorer folder viewer and right-click on the pinned shortcuts on the left (Desktop, Documents, etc.), then in properties > location you can move the folder target.
Maybe this will allow you to change it from a OneDrive folder to somewhere else?
Ironically, both India and China forbid lighters on planes. Famously you see a collection of them around the bins just outside the airport as all the smokers leave them for others.
Wheel impacts are the main way. But hardware can be bulky and trains can be surprisingly cramped.
We squeezed some track condition monitoring hardware into some locos but it was single-driver operations locations and we cannibalised some of the room that would have otherwise been occupied by the second driver.
The deluge of gambling ads on TV during Friday night footy is absolutely appalling. There’s a very robust conduit for normalising sports gambling through advertisements around the broadcasts and it’s clearly influencing young adults. I’ve noticed a dramatic uptick in how common it is compared to when I was that age.
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