App-Based Gambling and Socal Media Continues To Be Great

Certain things are an ill, but we accept them. Sometimes it's because they've been a part of society basically forever and it seems impossible not not (drinking, though the prohibition had something to say), and sometimes it's a more gradual acceptance (marijuana legalization). Cynically, I'd also argue that governments only legalize such things when the benefits, such as sin taxes, outweigh the negatives.

Don't get me wrong. Here in Canada, liquor is absolutely taxed fairly heavily, especially compared to our neighbours to the south. Alcohol affects public health in a variety of ways: liver and kidney diseases, increased risk of various cancers, heart disease. But tax on liquor helps fund provicial health care. It's not an even ledger, but it's something.

There doesn't seem to be any sort of balance to online gambling. And if I have any one issue on which I'm a raging puritan, it's this. It is far, far easier, and quicker, to wreck your life via online gambling. And you don't even get a wicked bender out of it.

It's getting to the point where pro athletes are getting death threats from numpties for not making the outcome of some bet or other. Lance McCrullers Jr, a pitcher for the Houston Astros, has been getting death threats after poor starts. His daughter overheard him talking about it with his wife over the phone, and they had to explain that their father was getting death threats because some rando was betting on him, or against him, and not making the bet.

This feels like something simmering - something that's legal only because the current "fuck you, got mine" environment, with leadership in the United States reflexively against anything involving regulation. But it also feels like something whose time is going to come, sooner rather than later. Our phones and social media have lied to us: the existence of someone on social media makes us feel like we know them, and we don't, we can't. It's asymmetric, though we tell ourselves it isn't. At some point, something very bad is going to happen.