Comic Strips

Back when we wore onions on our belts sports betting was related to the mafia. Bookies were low level operators, and people who owed money got their legs broken.

Gambling will save the economy after the AI bubble bursts! /s

It got intentionally normalized by the Grand Old Party of Christian Family Values because it is very profitable.

This is like my gambling story, except I just lost $60 on a slot machine in ten minutes and wondered why people thought this was fun.

Alex Trebek said that gambling had no appeal for him.

If he won $100.00 it didn't make any difference in his life, and if he lost $100.00 he felt like an idiot.

What put me off from gambling at an early age was trying to get a porygon in the original Pokemon Red Version.

Also, I played a lot of casino minigames in the Mario64 DS remake. I did alright at some but it definitely taught me that you can never truly predict the outcomes, so don't bet with anything you don't mind losing.

As an adult though, I literally never felt the desire to actually gamble with real money. That sounds idiotic.

I once got 20x the payout from a slot machine in a pub when I was in my teens. Thought i would never be this lucky again, withdraw the winnings and spend it all by buying a Gameboy game. Never spend any money on gambling again in my life.

Brother took me to a casino for my 21st birthday. I did a bit of research, so I only took in $40 and left my atm card at home.

I wanted to play the cool looking slot machines. Brother convinced me that roulette was going to be way more fun. It was a busy night, so it took almost an hour to get a spot at the table. And the minimum bet was $10. Roughly 3 min after finally getting to bet, I'd lost all $40, having not won a single time (even my bets on the colors failed).

It was so utterly disappointing, especially when the next person in our party got to the table and managed to keep their bets going for over an hour and left with a few hundred extra $ that night. Most of the night was me just standing around bored out of my mind.

I'm very thankful for that early experience. Later experiences were better, but also far more tempting. I attribute my ability to resist the temptation largely to how shitty that first night was.

I fucking love horse racing man, and no i dont gamble (anymore lol)

I'd wager the majority of people trying to get into professional sports is because of the money.

All I needed to know was to pay attention to the terminology and optics of NFL drafts and the power dynamics following it. The fact that those in power are a-okay with problematic stuff like that, strongly suggests they have skewed ethics and likely apply that ethos everywhere.

Same, but many people are wired very, very differently from you and I here.

Gambling addiction is about the high like any other addiction. It comes down to brain chemistry, and personality. There's the high from anticipation, and a second from the payoff just like every addiction. Gambling is just easier than most because it's money, something we all have to use. Like food addiction, it's something we all need to consume.

It’s “intermittent” or “unpredictable reward” coupled with the addict’s brain wiring. The thrill and relief of a win is addictive.

If you’re not wired that way you simply aren’t going to “get it”, same as not really understanding any other addiction - at least in any way other than intellectually.

It's basically a skinner box + the unknown, if I spend $1000 then I've spent $1000, but if I gamble $1000, I could win all this money, or I could lose it all, no one knows, and every time it's new + dangerous. It also just ruins your perspective/ respect for money, because if you gained/lost 20k in an afternoon, what are you going to do go back to working for $20 an hour for half a year for what you made/spent in 2 hours?

I don't gamble, I just buy pallets of equipment at auction in the hopes that I can resell it for a profit.

But you can win it's practically gaurenteed!

-Ads.

Seriously, why don't these things have warnings on them like cigarettes. I see ads for the local casino that say stuff like "riches are just 3 exits down," it's crazy. Should also say "GAMBLING IS ADDICTIVE AND YOU WILL LOSE MONEY" or something.

What you're hoping for is that governments go back to protecting people instead of being used by the rich to transfer wealth from the citizenry.

Everyone knows gambling has zero social benefit and does a lot of harm. But none of that matters because you can show up to a few congressmen with a few thousand dollars and they'll do what you tell them, and no other congress critters will get in their way because every other congresscritter wants support for their grifts.

Government is working hard to find a million ways to redistribute wealth upward. Public advertising of gambling is just one more sign of corruption.

Fun fact: you CAN win money because they operate in a legal gray area calling themselves "prediction markets".

Basically you buy percentage shares in an outcome and if that outcome happens all of those that bought the shares get a payout. At least that's my understanding of it.

Do I do it? Fuck no.

Do I know more than a few people that do? Literally more than half of my coworkers do and a few people in my friend group do.

Bonus "fun" fact: they're not limited to just gambling. If you managed to miss it, not too long ago people were gambling on events in the Iran War.

If it wasn't obvious I'm very much against this practice. Shit's fucked.

I've never had cable in my entire life. Parents never paid for it, and I got so sick of watching planes crash into buildings 25 years ago that I stopped watching it entirely. It didn't take long before advertising drove me crazy, and I've never been back.

I've been arguing with strangers online ever since. I should get back into books.

The only reason I have cable TV is it was literally cheaper to get it packaged with my Internet than just getting the Internet alone.