I support banning it. And it's advertising, too. Maybe impose some form of daily limit on in-person gambling as well.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
75 points (97.5% liked)
UK Politics
3053 readers
151 users here now
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both [email protected] and [email protected] .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I support banning it.
Why?
It's a predatory market. The only people who benefit are pigs who rig the games.
What about the gamers themselves? Don't you think they may like the way they are choosing to spend their time and money in?
Don't you think meth addicts like how they're spending their money?
Don't you think adults are capable of making decisions?
They are, just not good ones
So you believe YOU are more capable of making decisions for them?
I am more capable of making good decisions than a gambling addict
So you believe have the right to make these decisions for other adults and dictate them what to do?
The advertising is a massive one. If you were trying to recover from a gambling addiction, you wouldn’t be able to watch any sport on TV. Every advert, especially late at night, is about betting.
Exactly. One of my Chinese friends had a big culture shock when they saw a gambling advert lol. They said it should be illegal and I found myself agreeing with them.
Trying to ban online gambling will just result in people switching to illegal gambling sites. At least the legal ones can be regulated
Fair point.
Why stop at online. The amount of pensioners and vulnerable people wasting their money on horses and fruit machines is pretty depressing.
On the one hand, I strongly believe in personal freedom (as long as you're only harming yourself) and if people want to spend their money, that way it should be up to them. On the other hand, some people are vulnerable and need to be protected from themselves.
But they're spending their kids' inheritance. I can see the innocence in putting a few quid against your mates betting on horses. But capitalised rigged gambling is just immoral
This. When only one side of the bet can lose. It is not gambling but rigged capitalism.
When an industry manages to remove all the risk from investment. While offering little to the society they inhabit.
High taxation to help return their cost to society. Seems a bare minimum charge.
At least with the likes of a lottery the odds are obvious and "only one person winning each month", etc. A fruit machine programmed to only win once a month isn't.
But they're spending their kids' inheritance
How incredibly entitled can you be?
I think it's a fair point just not well made.
To paraphrase my first reply, to each their own, if someone truly enjoys gambling, they'll find a way to do it, legal or not.
However, there is a lot of good that money could be doing, whether it is used to help your kids or anything else like that, rather than it being hoovered up by fat cat CEOs and people that hold shares in gambling businesses.
Yes. People must be told what's good for them by nanny government.
To be honest, yes they do
If the government provides a safety net for those with no money, it's reasonable for them to ban leading causes of losing money, like gambling, to save money for those who are just unfortunate
If the government provides healthcare, it's reasonable for them to ban leading causes of ill health, like smoking, to save capacity for those with less avoidable illnesses or injuries
How about extremely addicting activities that do nothing but increase the wealth of already wealthy people and drive people who need money into increasing (up to and including absurd) levels of debt isn't a good thing for society. So get rid of it or put in sensible guardrails.
You can have gambling without money being at stake. It's just as "fun" and doesn't ruin anyone's lives anymore than anything else that's addicting.
One half of Britons support increasing tax on the other half.
IIRC, the reason it wasn't previously taxed, is that it would have opened up writing off gambling losses against tax.
Don't quote me, obv.
So maybe it would need a lot of other tax law changing at the same time, to not end up encouraging people accidentally the other way.
Tax them at 95% or something.