This is horrible for America.
Matthew Broderick, an actor I used to respect, is now doing commercials for another gambling app, except this one isn’t sports or cards or slots, it’s games that resemble Candy Crush, etc. with a gambling component built in.
They aren’t targeting young men with this one, they are targeting middle-aged women, and not just any middle-aged women, they are targeting those with unfulfilled lives. I’ve seen three separate ads, and all of them feature middle-aged women who are being ignored or treated badly by their families. They look sad, until Ferris Beuller sidles up and gives them this fun new game to play, and forget their troubles. I’ve never seen a more blatant attempt to take advantage of a emotionally unstable person than these ads. They are reprehensible.
Add to that, the fact that many household budgets are handled by the Wife/Mom. It’s only a matter of time before we start seeing stories of women who lost the family home because they gambled away the family finances.
This is insidious. They are trying to keep as much money out of our hands as possible, and what we do get, they scheme to take it all away. They want us to die penniless.
John hamm, they got Hamm and he rarely does any ads at all.
Hamn is a horrible human being.
A pledge died at his fraternity under his watch. The individuals involved barely got a slap on the wrist.
He may well be but I meant he either likes their service or they paid him an ungodly sum.
“So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern…Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”
George Orwell, 1984
The word is ‘lose’, not ‘spend’.
And ‘addiction’, not ‘favourite pastime’.
yeah, they would be better advised to throw their money into the garbage, at least that way they wouldn’t make some rich asshole even richer.
Nice try big garbage industry man
No, spend is right. The number being compared against is the amount spent on gambling. Obviously some of those bets won, so the amount lost would be far less.
All fair points. I just object to people breathlessly putting out stories like this as if it’s a good thing and anything other than gambling at best, and insider trading at worst. The only people winning on those sites are the people with inside information.
(edit: fixed typos)
Most gambling winnings go right back into gambling and are subsequently lost.
I would be surprised if it was “far less” although mathematically it must be strictly less.
In other words, the average American adult placed roughly $1,000 in legal bets on sports last year. Handle is gross throughput, not consumer expenditure: over 90% of what is wagered gets returned to bettors in the form of winnings. That $1,000 in bets translates to roughly $100 in average losses per adult.
But it does point out the vast majority of the losses are absorbed by 5% of gamblers.
Say I started with $100 and made a bet but only won 90 back. Then the next day I do it again with my 90, but only win 80 this time. Repeat this until I have $10 left, I bet that and lose it.
By your logic, I’ve lost $550, since thats the amount of money I’ve bet over the week and a half. In reality, any sane person would say I’ve lost $100.
This is a very American thing.
Measuring popularity in terms of money spent.
By this metric, spending time with loved ones or going for a short walk has zero popularity.
Spoiler: This is how GDP works too. Didn’t make any money? It’s not considered real work. EVERYTHING in the US serves capital - not people.
I think it’s relevant when comparing to other popular entertainment like going to the movies which is another big capitalist institution.
Not really. The time to money ratio is so different for all of them and there’s no way to compare.
I spend $20 and go to the movies and that’s it. I’m there for 2 hours no more money spent.
I spend $20 on sports betting and ten minutes later I can do it again and ten minutes later I can do it again and again and again. I know people who drop hundreds every weekend on it. I literally can not spend enough time in a theater to drop the same amount of money.
Well that’s a different question, which one is more dangerous to personal finance or something like that, but in terms of macro economics what matters is dollars spent. Depends what question you’re trying to ask, yes I think corporations should be categorically banned from touching anything relating to gambling because as you alluded to, it’s one of the most destructive “recreational” activities.
How is it different than day trading in the stock market? Both systems are fixed to lose.
I had figured it would, once gambling regulations were bypassed, and no-one recognized that gambling houses make for a moral hazard.
For a long time the US economy has depended on companies exploiting human cognitive biases and addictive mechanisms, from selling booze to bank service fees, to click-wrapped ToS agreements, and yes, to gambling.
There’s a reason we regulated it, much the way we regulate advertising so that it’s not deceptive.
One beef is the slop of fear and rage that is used to sell far right news media. FOX News even encourages its viewership to abandon all over news sources, like an abusive domestic partner.
If we don’t figure out a way out of it, so that confidence ploys and cognitive manipulation for profit are once again regarded as foul play and business in bad faith, then we’re just going to be owned by the ownership class. Literally.
But they’re not very smart, so they’ll not do a thing to address the climate crisis.
There’s no hope for this place. May our children forgive us.
Kinda hope they don’t. The US was equipped with plenty of ways, even through the propaganda, to dodge the evil bullshit and the country just keeps barrelling towards hell. And here in Canada we’re doing the same thing, arguably worse because the US is RIGHT THERE and we’re like “nah, I’m not going to learn from those mistakes actually.”
Canada and the US do not deserve forgiveness. May our children survive us, and may they have the strength to hate all the conservatives, “centrists”, and politically ignorant people who sold their lives to a handful of the most stupid, greedy, and dweeby fucks the human race has ever produced.
Sign of a real healthy society, that.
Yup. More people are desperate and are trying for a chance to “win it big” and get out of the situation they’re in. Whereas art, museums, etc. doesn’t help an immediate living situation and gets deprioritized
Elysium
What a deranged headline.
Its comparison is nonsensical.
No sane person gambles for entertaining purposes.
People gamble because they are addicts or in need of money.
Who isn’t in need of money? Isn’t that the overwhelming majority of people?
The sports gambling apps will be the number one cause of divorce in the US one day. The sheer number of married men betting on them…
It’s going the other way, too. I just wrote a wall of text about the new Candy Crush style of gambling apps that are targeting unfulfilled middle-aged women, encouraging them to play these apps to self-soothe after poor treatment by their families. Seriously, that’s the pitch in the three separate ads I’ve seen, featuring celebrity spokesperson Ferris Beuller.
Women often handle the family finances. Soon we’ll be seeing stories of women who lost the house gambling on high-octane Candy Crush.
Sane people will put in 20$ for fun at the casino after a nice dinner date. So yes, it happens.
I hate this country more every day
Yeah in part that is because it isn’t a pastime it’s a full blown life crippling addiction for a lot of people.
The language they use in this article pisses me off too.
This shit isn’t healthy and talking about it like it is a healthy behavior is very irresponsible on the part of the media.
Americans love the surprising new hobby of shooting up fentanyl, spending more on it than food or housing!
The amount of money spent doesn’t really accurately represent how much a past time is “liked”, since money (obviously) isn’t distributed evenly. A more useful metric would be how much time people spend doing this in comparison to the other options, which is impossible to measure. Also in theory it could be literally 1 or 2 people doing the gambling if they have enough money, while everyone else goes to museums and listens to music.
It’s even more true with the other options not being exactly expensive (in particular museums, but the other options are will). Try spending 50k $ gambling: no problem. Try spending 1k $ going to museums: you’ll be busy for 2 years or something.
Basically the whole premise is just dumb.
thats a good point. this could all be an effect of wealth disparity which would make sense.
If that’s all you’re taking from it, you’re completely missing the real points:
The basic premise of the headline is already incredibly flawed. It suggests gambling is the “favorite passtime” becase that’s where most noney was spent. Is that true for you? It sure isn’t for me… I have more hobbies than I have time for, some are cheap/free, some cost money, some cost more money, but the money they cost isn’t correlated with how fun they are or my appreciation for them.
Secondly, even if money spent on something would represent peoples “rankings” of them somehow, go try and spend 1000$ on museums. I sure this is different from country to country, but most museums here are either free or “cheap”, no matter how long you stay, and will entertain you for hours or a day for whatever that small fee was. Even if you did have the time, how many weeks or even months would it take you to use up the 1000$? Even movies, assuming it mostly means going to a cinema is less cheap, but far from expensive per time spent there, too. Even including popcorn or snacks, breaking 50$ for a single movie is gonna be a stretch, so how long for 1000$? Music could mean concerts, which can be hundreds of dollars in some cases for a concert, but those don’t even happen daily. Could also mean digital streaming, but that’s like capped at let’s call it 20$ per month. Buying digital albums/music is not capped like that, but assuming you are buying them to actually listen to it, you’re again limited by time.
The point is the whole comparison is grotesque: Money spent on gambling is unlimited. I can spend 1000$ right now on some online poker chips, or betting on horses, or whatever else with absolutely no issues. The amount per time unit is only limited by how much you have (and/or your credit). All other mentioned examples are limited by your time or rather the money you can spend on them for per hour you enjoy them. Don’t you think that basic fact might somewhat skew the comparison?
Well… you don’t get money back from movies, arts, museums, or music, but there is a miniscule chance you could from gambling.
With the economy the way it is, it’s more likely people are just desperate. And some are definitely addicted, of course.
Yeah, this unfortunately. Too real
Anything but vote for somebody to tax wealth instead of work.
Who can I vote for that would actually do that?
Someone who supports FPTP and plays dumb about it, obviously. /s
Depends which country you’re in. UK: Greens, France: LFI, US: independents, Italy: Partito Democratico, …
