Take my poker but let penny auction sites live...BAD

[matt0611]

In a free society people should be able to gamble their own hard-earned money in games if they so choose so. End of story.

People should be free to make their own choices if they're not hurting anyone, good or bad.

 

[spidey07]

I'll be betting online for the ky derby races all day today. Perfectly legal.

 

[DominionSeraph]

People should be free to make their own choices if they're not hurting anyone, good or bad.

It does hurt others. Workers destroying themselves while still remaining players in the economy is very disruptive to the economy.

How about if we make it a capital offense to lose? Turning every game of poker into a game of Russian Roulette would deal with the detritus that gambling creates. Instead of a large economy growing less efficient we would have a shrinking economy with a concentration of wealth until we'd killed off everybody stupid enough to gamble.
I'm fine with that idea; and you wanted to gamble, right?

 

[matt0611]

It does hurt others. Workers destroying themselves while still remaining players in the economy is very disruptive to the economy.

How about if we make it a capital offense to lose? Turning every game of poker into a game of Russian Roulette would deal with the detritus that gambling creates. Instead of a large economy growing less efficient we would have a shrinking economy with a concentration of wealth until we'd killed off everybody stupid enough to gamble.
I'm fine with that idea; and you wanted to gamble, right?

And if I want to become a bum and live in a shack and no longer work anymore that also hurts the economy, but so what? I have the right to do that.

I'm not your slave. Every man owns his body and his own money.

 

[Zebo]

Gambling is a fight over what people have banked rather than the creation of new wealth.

Take a woodcutter and a furniture maker. The furniture maker needs wood. The woodcutter happens to need a chair.
The woodcutter happens to have a tree he felled yesterday. The furniture maker has a chair he made yesterday. So... do they gamble? Is it an efficient use of time for them each to spend days trying to one-up each other, both in an attempt to get the other's small cache of wealth for no cost to them?
If the woodcutter would just fell another tree, and the furniture maker would make another chair, and they were to trade, they would both have their original bankroll plus exactly what they want.
Work allows for sustainable gain. Gambling is nothing but net loss and can even set things up for a downward spiral -- what happens if the loser now has to sell the tools of his trade just to eat? Now he can't work. It is a significant loss to the system when a person loses the wealth required to create wealth efficiently.

Gambling screws with the market's disbursement. Instead of wealth movement showing a preference for movement supporting the creation of more wealth, you have wealth movement that prefers nothing, taking away from the pool finding its "best fit." (To the winner it's "found money", leading to splurging behavior, not wise investment. So what you have is an blip in luxury demand with no sustainable backing while the real market is crashing.)

We have ample evidence that unregulated gambling causes serious problems. It's not something that people self-regulate particularly well, and even small fluctuations in disposable income can have profound effects.

Gambling is only a zero sum game if you exclude entertainment value then it's no different than movie making.


Re OP: I don't play online. I'm not good enough. I play live every Friday night with guys and wait until they get drunk and I have water in my vodka bottle. I have only failed to finish in the money (top 3) 1 time this year.

We also play a really accelerated version of poker. start with 2 tables ~16-20 of us which concatenate at about when 4 are on each table and blinds DOUBLE every 10 min. This allows us two games starting at 7 until about 1am.

 

[nonlnear]

Gambling is a fight over what people have banked rather than the creation of new wealth.

Take a woodcutter and a furniture maker. The furniture maker needs wood. The woodcutter happens to need a chair.
The woodcutter happens to have a tree he felled yesterday. The furniture maker has a chair he made yesterday. So... do they gamble? Is it an efficient use of time for them each to spend days trying to one-up each other, both in an attempt to get the other's small cache of wealth for no cost to them?
If the woodcutter would just fell another tree, and the furniture maker would make another chair, and they were to trade, they would both have their original bankroll plus exactly what they want.
Work allows for sustainable gain. Gambling is nothing but net loss and can even set things up for a downward spiral -- what happens if the loser now has to sell the tools of his trade just to eat? Now he can't work. It is a significant loss to the system when a person loses the wealth required to create wealth efficiently.

Gambling screws with the market's disbursement. Instead of wealth movement showing a preference for movement supporting the creation of more wealth, you have wealth movement that prefers nothing, taking away from the pool finding its "best fit." (To the winner it's "found money", leading to splurging behavior, not wise investment. So what you have is an blip in luxury demand with no sustainable backing while the real market is crashing.)

We have ample evidence that unregulated gambling causes serious problems. It's not something that people self-regulate particularly well, and even small fluctuations in disposable income can have profound effects.

This has absolutely nothing to do with what is "wrong" with gambling. Online poker was shut down because the traditional gambling lobbyists are just that powerful. Online poker will be reinstated in a couple years with a provision that, in order to obtain a license, you must have (or at least have some part of your enterprise overseen by a company with) an "established reputation" in the gaming industry. It was a thug play by gangsters who, in this brave new age, have the luxury of using senators like Harry Ried as their hit men rather than fighting against the powers that be.

 

[Darwin333]

Yes, penny auctions are a scam designed to take advantage of the way humans react to sunk costs, but it is commerce. The endpoint is the reception of an item of discrete value that you can measure against the acquisition cost. So eventually you will have all the information you need to make the decision as to whether the system is right for you.

Gambling, OTOH, has no such endpoint. "Just one more spin," might result in the "big win," so it leads to people throwing good money after bad in a system in which nothing of value is created. The only one who truly profits in gambling is the one taking a cut of the action.

Kind of like any other entertainment based business...

 

[Darwin333]

It does hurt others. Workers destroying themselves while still remaining players in the economy is very disruptive to the economy.

How about if we make it a capital offense to lose? Turning every game of poker into a game of Russian Roulette would deal with the detritus that gambling creates. Instead of a large economy growing less efficient we would have a shrinking economy with a concentration of wealth until we'd killed off everybody stupid enough to gamble.
I'm fine with that idea; and you wanted to gamble, right?

I know someone who is addicted to concerts. He has lost numerous jobs due to it and almost all of his income is used to feed his addiction (or at least was, havent seen him in a while). Should that be illegal too?

 

[DominionSeraph]

And if I want to become a bum and live in a shack and no longer work anymore that also hurts the economy, but so what? I have the right to do that.

Cold, hunger, financial dependence, and a lack of social position losing you the efficiencies of equal friendship which - both in kind and as a specific instance - will result in a state of nature in which your sexual frustration will increase, serve to trend that to an overall negative. It doesn't have to be regulated because it already is.

Gambling, OTOH, is seen as a means to a positive. It is an emotional perspective allowed free wings because the abstraction of monetization allows the losses to be distanced from real wealth.
If you had to put the real costs in the pot you would not gamble.

Gambling is an artifact that can easily bypass a person's natural ability to regulate himself. It is to wealth management the what Fox News is to information -- if you cannot rise above the level of the rabble and guard against natural self-stupidity, you're just fucked.

I'm not your slave. Every man owns his body and his own money.

Gambling is one behavior that can end up owning you.

 

[matt0611]

Cold, hunger, financial dependence, and a lack of social position losing you the efficiencies of equal friendship which - both in kind and as a specific instance - will result in a state of nature in which your sexual frustration will increase, serve to trend that to an overall negative. It doesn't have to be regulated because it already is.

Gambling, OTOH, is seen as a means to a positive. It is an emotional perspective allowed free wings because the abstraction of monetization allows the losses to be distanced from real wealth.
If you had to put the real costs in the pot you would not gamble.

Gambling is an artifact that can easily bypass a person's natural ability to regulate himself. It is to wealth management the what Fox News is to information -- if you cannot rise above the level of the rabble and guard against natural self-stupidity, you're just fucked.



You are owned by your DNA and by the output of your sensory inputs.

No, I'm saying if I want to decrease my quality of living by not working so hard, down-scaling my house, down-scaling my job, just having loads of free time to think and sit around watch tv and be lazy, this will have a negative impact on the economy. BUT SO WHAT.

I know LOADS of people who do just this. They are capable of so much more but they don't want to. They are happy to be what they are, to make what they make, they enjoy life. Let them be.

I am a free man and you shouldn't be able to tell me I can't voluntarily make financial transactions with people if I so wish to. Just like you shouldn't be able to tell me I can't gamble my own money. If I want to do that its my business.

Life is about choices, learning from mistakes, enjoying it even in dark times. This is why every man yearns to be free above all else.

This outlawing of online poker has nothing to do with morality anyway. Its simply an excuse for a power grab.

 

[spidey07]

Cold, hunger, financial dependence, and a lack of social position losing you the efficiencies of equal friendship which - both in kind and as a specific instance - will result in a state of nature in which your sexual frustration will increase, serve to trend that to an overall negative. It doesn't have to be regulated because it already is.

Gambling, OTOH, is seen as a means to a positive. It is an emotional perspective allowed free wings because the abstraction of monetization allows the losses to be distanced from real wealth.
If you had to put the real costs in the pot you would not gamble.

Gambling is an artifact that can easily bypass a person's natural ability to regulate himself. It is to wealth management the what Fox News is to information -- if you cannot rise above the level of the rabble and guard against natural self-stupidity, you're just fucked.



Gambling is one behavior that can end up owning you.

Ever the social engineering progressive you are, with little regard to liberty. No surprise you supported HOAs and draconian tactics all for the "greater good".

By golly, we WILL live how you want us to live. This is the mind of a liberal and progressive in action. Pay attention to how he thinks, we MUST defeat this.

You honestly believe we are just too stupid to make our own decisions or live. Fucking liberal.

In fact, I think I'll do some online gambling tonight just to give you and all those that think like you a big middle finger. I'm up for the year, like I am most years.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Gambling is only a zero sum game if you exclude entertainment value then it's no different than movie making.

Again, only if you're playing with monopoly money.
Playing with real money adds in the incentive of financial gain which is not present in watching a movie. "More money," can be translated into, "More of everything that I want," as money can be traded for things that you want. So it is entertainment that reinforces itself with the possibility of much greater entertainment to come by the proceeds of the entertainment. And it doesn't just promise "more good," as money can be used for, "less bad." So gambling can still be perceived as "The Answer," even if you've dug yourself into a hole.

It is the tying of these broad based futures to the present activity (with a layer of abstraction) that makes it dangerous. The mixing of values screws with a person's ability to judge the present action on its own merits.
Look at the number of people ITT whose brains cannot slice the difference. Perhaps some have a synthetic emotional heuristic that they could use to avoid the pitfalls, but they cannot pin it with an intellectual model.
High-level emotional-heuristic -based positions are not stable. They may work for a particular person at a particular point in time but they cannot be relied upon. To rely on one as the only safety net for society as a whole is pretty retarded.

There's a reason I say, "Atheism is not for the stupid." Stupid people cannot process how the world works -- they rely on stupid half-truths that compress things down to their level of understanding. This leaves them wide open to mistakes and manipulation because the system is fact-based and they cannot properly integrate the facts as they don't know what the model looks like uncompressed.
Addictive behaviors can have a similar effect but on the emotional level. They take advantage that emotion's lack of granularity to output an improper reaction. The closest thing to decompression is analysis, at which P&N and humanity in general suck balls. Other than that you're pretty much relying on relig/ion<--->wisdom. Wisdom is neat, but it requires you to make many of the mistakes you wish to avoid. Religion allows you to stand on the shoulders of giants with its partial collection of the wisdom of the ages, but it's tied to a bullshit framework and thus easily manipulated -- the bullshit is tied to nothing and the endpoint wisdom isn't yours, so it's tied to nothing but the bullshit. With religion you have to take the bad with the good until you can learn to differentiate, and proper differentiation can be a major problem when you're corrupted by religion's bullshit premises. It can end up with what we're seeing now -- people wrapping everything into, "Me, me, me, me, me," because with the lack of a proper framework for processing the external world on the external level all you're left with are the selfish reactions.
I wish there was a good way to teach conservatives about the external world, but unfortunately the First World is so comfortable that there isn't sufficient leverage to overcome their intellectual laziness.
You cannot teach one who perceives no reason to learn.

 

[JSt0rm]

Wisdom is neat, but it requires you to make many of the mistakes you wish to avoid.

Great post. I do disagree with this part. An observant person can witness someone else making a mistake and learn that way. They dont need to step on every landmine themselves.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Ever the social engineering progressive you are, with little regard to liberty. No surprise you supported HOAs and draconian tactics all for the "greater good".

In your headlong charge into confirmation bias looking for anything that you might use to prop up that ego of yours that reality has seen fit to lay low, you have manufactured a level of care that I do not hold.

I enjoy working the numbers. I am far better than any of you at running them, and I don't mind shitting them out for you. What the world does with the numbers of reality is not likely to concern me much. Humans tend to be inertial beings, and that inertial will likely take care of my life.

Remove the personal angle and humanity's success or failure are largely scientific curiosities. Trending upwards or trending downwards say different things about humanity and I allow for either set of statements to be true.

My ability to see a workable high-value system does not mean that the mass of humanity possesses the tools to rapidly get there from here. I do not assert it can be imprinted.

Your stupidity adds to the evidence that America is likely headed to a fall. Perhaps there will be a few hundred, a few thousand, or a few tens of thousands of years of darkness in the region. If such will be, such will be, just like any other "is."
It's all just physics.

I'm up for the year, like I am most years.

And yet you're so far beneath me.

 

[1prophet]

This has absolutely nothing to do with what is "wrong" with gambling. Online poker was shut down because the traditional gambling lobbyists are just that powerful. Online poker will be reinstated in a couple years with a provision that, in order to obtain a license, you must have (or at least have some part of your enterprise overseen by a company with) an "established reputation" in the gaming industry. It was a thug play by gangsters who, in this brave new age, have the luxury of using senators like Harry Ried as their hit men rather than fighting against the powers that be.

This,

The Gambling industry is one of the biggest lobbying groups in America, they are the ones behind the Internet gambling ban because they weren't getting their cut.

Once they figure out how to regulate and profit from it they will successfully lobby to bring it back probably under the guise of tax revenue.

All this other BS in this thread about gambling is just feel good fluff to justify ones moralistic position for or against, as always follow the money.

 

[spidey07]

In your headlong charge into confirmation bias looking for anything that you might use to prop up that ego of yours that reality has seen fit to lay low, you have manufactured a level of care that I do not hold.

I enjoy working the numbers. I am far better than any of you at running them, and I don't mind shitting them out for you. What the world does with the numbers of reality is not likely to concern me much. Humans tend to be inertial beings, and that inertial will likely take care of my life.

Remove the personal angle and humanity's success or failure are largely scientific curiosities. Trending upwards or trending downwards say different things about humanity and I allow for either set of statements to be true.

My ability to see a workable high-value system does not mean that the mass of humanity possesses the tools to rapidly get there from here. I do not assert it can be imprinted.

Your stupidity adds to the evidence that America is likely headed to a fall. Perhaps there will be a few hundred, a few thousand, or a few tens of thousands of years of darkness in the region. If such will be, such will be, just like any other "is."
It's all just physics.



And yet you're so far beneath me.

Pay attention to the mind of a liberal/progressive in action here. This is what they think, this is what they truly believe. They must be defeated.

If you enjoy working the numbers then you should be an excellent handicapper and use that ability to make a ton. But you're not and wouldn't know a thomlinson or beyer number if it smacked you on the nose.

In fact, you should be publishing your own handicapping and charging others for your smarts in our capitalist society instead of telling us what to do with OUR MONEY. Call it the DomFigure if you're so smart. Fucking liberal.

 

[JSt0rm]

Pay attention to the mind of a liberal/progressive in action here. This is what they think, this is what they truly believe. They must be defeated.

Spidey, u retarded.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Great post. I do disagree with this part. An observant person can witness someone else making a mistake and learn that way. They dont need to step on every landmine themselves.

That's.... complicated. It's a shortcut that works, but it doesn't have the full expression of personal experience upon which wisdom is based. It's an intellectual process with a lot of guesses involved.
It is scientifically horrible and can lead to stupidity here and there, but it can be used to extend one's experiences because humans are so similar to one another. It does not have the weight of wisdom, though.

Indeed, I would not suggest you step on a land mine even though you probably haven't been well tested for susceptibility to death and dismemberment.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Pay attention to the mind of a liberal/progressive in action here.

I am a realist living in a universe that the conservative model is insufficient to explain. Reality has a liberal bias, so the person who presents the proper model of reality looks to be liberal. Such is just the way of things. You seek to place the blame for this at my feet, yet I did not create this universe.
Blame your god that the world isn't as stupid as you are.

Would you care to venture into the world of Equestria? My model of that world differs from my model of this one. The evidence it presents is different.
Ah, but you wouldn't know where to start, eh? You view everything through prejudice, and demand that reality fit within the bounds that your little model can handle without shitting itself in an avalanche of contradiction.

Not everyone is as stupid as you, spidey. Try to get that through your stupid little head.

Jesus, could your models be any more juvenile?

 

[Zebo]

Again, only if you're playing with monopoly money.
Playing with real money adds in the incentive of financial gain which is not present in watching a movie. "More money," can be translated into, "More of everything that I want," as money can be traded for things that you want. So it is entertainment that reinforces itself with the possibility of much greater entertainment to come by the proceeds of the entertainment. And it doesn't just promise "more good," as money can be used for, "less bad." So gambling can still be perceived as "The Answer," even if you've dug yourself into a hole.

It is the tying of these broad based futures to the present activity (with a layer of abstraction) that makes it dangerous. The mixing of values screws with a person's ability to judge the present action on its own merits.
Look at the number of people ITT whose brains cannot slice the difference. Perhaps some have a synthetic emotional heuristic that they could use to avoid the pitfalls, but they cannot pin it with an intellectual model.
High-level emotional-heuristic -based positions are not stable. They may work for a particular person at a particular point in time but they cannot be relied upon. To rely on one as the only safety net for society as a whole is pretty retarded.

There's a reason I say, "Atheism is not for the stupid." Stupid people cannot process how the world works -- they rely on stupid half-truths that compress things down to their level of understanding. This leaves them wide open to mistakes and manipulation because the system is fact-based and they cannot properly integrate the facts as they don't know what the model looks like uncompressed.
Addictive behaviors can have a similar effect but on the emotional level. They take advantage that emotion's lack of granularity to output an improper reaction. The closest thing to decompression is analysis, at which P&N and humanity in general suck balls. Other than that you're pretty much relying on relig/ion<--->wisdom. Wisdom is neat, but it requires you to make many of the mistakes you wish to avoid. Religion allows you to stand on the shoulders of giants with its partial collection of the wisdom of the ages, but it's tied to a bullshit framework and thus easily manipulated -- the bullshit is tied to nothing and the endpoint wisdom isn't yours, so it's tied to nothing but the bullshit. With religion you have to take the bad with the good until you can learn to differentiate, and proper differentiation can be a major problem when you're corrupted by religion's bullshit premises. It can end up with what we're seeing now -- people wrapping everything into, "Me, me, me, me, me," because with the lack of a proper framework for processing the external world on the external level all you're left with are the selfish reactions.
I wish there was a good way to teach conservatives about the external world, but unfortunately the First World is so comfortable that there isn't sufficient leverage to overcome their intellectual laziness.
You cannot teach one who perceives no reason to learn.

I agree with a lot of that especially religion part but liberty is paramount. Often times I think I know what's best for others but really I'm just one person and they are one too. I'm not more or less important than them therefore I have no right to insert myself in their lives with dictum and even less want those idiots inserting themselves in mine. In other-words mind your own fucking business.

 

[DominionSeraph]

I agree with a lot of that especially religion part but liberty is paramount. Often times I think I know what's best for others but really I'm just one person and they are one too. I'm not more or less important than them therefore I have no right to insert myself in their lives with dictum and even less want those idiots inserting themselves in mine. In other-words mind your own fucking business.

This isn't about dictating what's best for a person, it's about acknowledging what's bad for the state.
Becoming a murderer may be very good for one person in an unregulated society. Doesn't mean that it's good for society. This is well established. We do not need to go though the trial-and-error process of giving people the liberty to kill because, "Freedom," before we can say, "Whoops."
So why do we need to go though the trial-and-error process of throwing unregulated gambling into a crowd of emotional children? It's giving a child a loaded gun with a candy-flavored barrel.

It is legal without the candy-flavoring. Why isn't that enough?

This isn't regulation of |behavior|, it is regulation of addictive, economically destructive behavior. There is no crossover into casualness. Gambling isn't an output into a dummy load, it's an output into an amplifier with positive feedback. Negative feedback is needed to control it.
If it smacked of nothing but a religious stricture I'd be all for letting it go wide open for the range to be fully explored -- for reality to shit out an answer. But that's been done before, and the answer was to severely limit it. Just because Americans have become complacent as to the risks is no reason to question the findings of history or the outputs of reasonable sociological and economic models.

 

[nonlnear]

This isn't about dictating what's best for a person, it's about acknowledging what's bad for the state.
Becoming a murderer may be very good for one person in an unregulated society. Doesn't mean that it's good for society. This is well established. We do not need to go though the trial-and-error process of giving people the liberty to kill because, "Freedom," before we can say, "Whoops."
So why do we need to go though the trial-and-error process of throwing unregulated gambling into a crowd of emotional children? It's giving a child a loaded gun with a candy-flavored barrel.

It is legal without the candy-flavoring. Why isn't that enough?

This isn't regulation of |behavior|, it is regulation of addictive, economically destructive behavior. There is no crossover into casualness. Gambling isn't an output into a dummy load, it's an output into an amplifier with positive feedback. Negative feedback is needed to control it.
If it smacked of nothing but a religious stricture I'd be all for letting it go wide open for the range to be fully explored -- for reality to shit out an answer. But that's been done before, and the answer was to severely limit it. Just because Americans have become complacent as to the risks is no reason to question the findings of history or the outputs of reasonable sociological and economic models.

Your post is below the minimum threshold of intelligence needed to warrant a point by point rebuttal. Its inanity is self-evident and self-defeating.

The attrition rate of people who "think" like you is apparently too low. Far too low. That is all.

 

[CallMeJoe]

Pay attention to the mind of a liberal/progressive in action here. This is what they think, this is what they truly believe. They must be defeated...

I think you stole that particular rant from El Flushbo when a caller dared challenge the Sacred Dogma of Ronaldus Magnus.

 

[Dr. Zaus]

Let's chat about the philosophy of science for a moment.

Is everything being physics on it's most primal level the best way to look at the world?

Isnt there something about chemistry that is better understood and no less true at the chemical level?

Isn't there something about biology that is better understood and no less true at the biological level?

Is there something about ecology that is is better understood and no lest true at the psychological, sociological or ecological level?

If you think the answer is "no" to any of the above I'll be happy to provide empirical evidence to the contrary. No doubt understanding constituent systems of the unit of analysis can be useful for understanding, deriving and explaining new truth; no doubt that understanding those systems created by the unit of analysis can also be useful for understanding deriving and explaining new truth.

But since we're fans of deconstruction lets take every point made by DS and consider them from a whole systems scientific perspective.

This isn't about dictating what's best for a person, it's about acknowledging what's bad for the state.

It is, in fact, dictating the behavior of the person because it is bad for the individual. The social consequences are based on the poor outcome for the individual. The problem with dictating the limits of individual freedom based on what is bad for the state is that the very act of curtailment of freedom is also bad for the state. Further taking the rights of the individual to make a choice is bad for the individual. Generally speaking, when maximizing the outcome for everyone we must give great weight to individual freedom; most importantly because we must have epistemological humility.

That said I reject the premise on which you base your argument. The maximization of outcome for the social system is a nebulous, undefined goal that can be redefined at the whim of the plutocracy/bureaucracy. The goal of law must not be the maximization of outcome for the state but the maximization of outcome for the individual's rights. In this way definition of "maximized" is determined by respect for the individual (this is an appeal to kantian deontological ethics), the other way around we have a natural pressure to disenfranchise/ remove protection for minorities that are perceived by the power elite to adversely impact the state.

Becoming a murderer may be very good for one person in an unregulated society. Doesn't mean that it's good for society.

But it is the protection of individual rights that justifies the curtailment of by the state of how far I can swing my fist. If not then the state should only regulate the murder of those that are beneficial to the state.

We do not need to go though the trial-and-error process of giving people the liberty to kill because, "Freedom," before we can say, "Whoops."

Not because it is bad for the state but because it is one person eliminating another's right to life.

So why do we need to go though the trial-and-error process of throwing unregulated gambling into a crowd of emotional children? It's giving a child a loaded gun with a candy-flavored barrel.

Because this behavior infringes upon the rights of the individual to peruse happiness. Any sort of investment takes a risk and the individual has the right to risk the resources that have been allocated to him or her in order to try and obtain greater wealth. I can, on the other hand, see limiting the behavior of individuals that will hurt innocent other's rights: make such a case and how to implement the solution in such a way as limits or appropriately balances the rights of others and you can implement the ban (possibly in a much more limited manner).

This isn't regulation of |behavior|, it is regulation of addictive, economically destructive behavior.

Should all such behavior be so regulated? Some would say porn falls into such a category, others religion, still others fast food, and yet others extra marital sex. Your principles are faulty, this means that your state-maximization arguments lack a testable theory to explain the behavior of the state. Individual maximizing individual freedom can be tried and tested and limited when found wanting: It is a coherent set of principles that can be tested for generalizability. Social engineering of the type you advocate is an incoherent set of random stabs at improving society with no way to test the efficacy of the procedure and no testable theory guiding it's behavior.

. Gambling isn't an output into a dummy load, it's an output into an amplifier with positive feedback. Negative feedback is needed to control it.

this trash can approach to proving/supporting your arguments fails:

1) to take into account the true definition of what is and is not part of the behavior you wish to regulate. Online slots are out, online poker, how about buying futures or derivatives? How about speculating in the real-estate market? The regulated construct is poorly defined because you have no guiding theory or principles on which to base your argument for regulation

2) To properly define the negative outcomes. You've made hand waved gestures at defining the bad outcome as some sort of psychological trickery the normal man cant handle or disruption of the proper association of work, money, and goods/services. The problem here is that you have created a 'bad thing' in your mind but why, specifically, it is bad is so nebulously defined that it can't be tested, disproven or even argued against (or, subsequently for)

3) to state the limits in which the regulation is optimal, sub optimal, a negative thing or entirely unimportant. You have looked only at the potential negative and only from the overall impact on the state. You have to understand that there are varying levels of efficacy for any procedure/intervention. The problem of course is that such deep investigations and self reflection are hard to accomplish and entirely impossible without a guiding set of principles/theories.

If it smacked of nothing but a religious stricture I'd be all for letting it go wide open for the range to be fully explored -- for reality to shit out an answer. But that's been done before, and the answer was to severely limit it. Just because Americans have become complacent as to the risks is no reason to question the findings of history or the outputs of reasonable sociological and economic models.

Religion and tradition should actively be abandoned but the spiritual relationship with God that drives those who know we have God given rights is something that will help you avoid the muddled thinking you've displayed here.

You are smart, but your critique of reality is incredibly narrow minded; indicative of the blinders that those that actively deny the existence of God must put on themselves in order to be able to deny that the complexity and unknowability of all existence leaves open the existence of God.


You lack epistemological and ontological humility AND the proper knowledge of how to pursue empirical truth to justify such hubris.

 

[nonlnear]

You lack epistemological and ontological humility AND the proper knowledge of how to pursue empirical truth to justify such hubris.

I must compliment you for having the patience to flatter Dominion Seraph with a full response. Well done, even if it is unlikely to accomplish anything. But then perhaps we don't always speak for the listener's benefit; it is an act of charity to exercise that measure of hope needed to speak when the listener is clearly so hardheaded.