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.
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
I hate this country more every day
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?
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.
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.
Who isn’t in need of money? Isn’t that the overwhelming majority of people?
Sane people will put in 20$ for fun at the casino after a nice dinner date. So yes, it happens.
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.
Anything but vote for somebody to tax wealth instead of work.
Who can I vote for that would actually do that?
Depends which country you’re in. UK: Greens, France: LFI, US: independents, Italy: Partito Democratico, …
Someone who supports FPTP and plays dumb about it, obviously. /s
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.
Gambling always goes up as the economy gets worse for the average worker.
How is it different than day trading in the stock market? Both systems are fixed to lose.
Americans love the surprising new hobby of shooting up fentanyl, spending more on it than food or housing!
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
The headline hurts my head.
Not a murican, but recently we wanted to visit a museum on Saturday. We expected it to be a nightmare. And we were the only ones. Saturday before we were in a gigantic mall and it was a literal nightmare. Like an antfarm of workerants spending their weekend.
That museum made me sad, it didn’t even cost money and had tons of interesting things to offer. But people prefer anthills and spending bigtime on silly brands.
Another generation further and we probably can close the museums.
Well, yeah i gave up on being impressed by humanity a long time ago, all you can do is choose to do things you think are nice and if everyone else thinks it’s too nerdy, that’s their loss. The museums are there for people, can’t force them to enjoy it unfortunately.
True. Though what I fear is that they’d just close. Why hire people to watch the entrance when noone comes anyway. Why do anything at all.
And it’s all museums here. They’re never really full or even remotely close to being crowded.
Not that we wouldn’t enjoy bring alone in there in absolute silence…we totally did 😁
Yeah for sure, keeping these spaces open for us to enjoy is absolutely important when society seems like they just want us to get drunk and go clubbing with them.
A joy I never really understood nor practiced. Not my idea of a mating-ground 😁
But yeah, keeping them open is paramount. At least ours are mostly state-run, so being profitable is not a thing. But still…
Gambling should be banned. And not just the prediction markets and sports-book, but the lottery too.
It’s just theft with extra steps.
Don’t forget the stock market.
Then it just goes underground, where it’s worse. Better to keep it above board, but that requires responsible regulation and enforcement, which hasn’t been the case.
Most importantly, there should be absolutely no advertising of any kind, period, and that goes for ALL vices - alcohol, cigarettes, weed, etc. We shouldn’t be encouraging people to participate in these activities.
We should also levy special taxes on these vices, which go to treatment facilities, so that anyone can get free treatment for addictions, and to anti-vice marketing and advertising.
Yea it’s one of the few things I’m like nope, should be illegal fully don’t give a fuck.
I call lottery the math tax
