Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
😇 Be Nice!
🏘️ Community Standards
🧬 Keep it Real
📽️ Credit Where Credit is Due
📋 Post Formatting
📬 Post Frequency/SPAM
🏴☠️ Internationalization (i18n)
Sí, por favor [Spanish/Español]🍿 Moderation
The following artists are banned from the community.
It should be noted that when you make reports, it is your responsibility to provide rational reasoning why something should be removed. Saying it simply breaks community rules is not always good enough.
Note: This is not a rule, but a helpful suggestion.
When posting images, you should strive to add alt-text for screen readers to use to describe the image you're posting:
Another helpful thing to do is to provide a transcription of the text in your images, as well as brief descriptions of what's going on. (example)
It's crazy how normalized gambling became the last 10 or so years.
It used to be really hard to gamble legally. Now it's hard to find someone not pushing "legal gambling" everywhere. Meanwhile, we still can't smoke weed in some parts of the world? What?
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
And that's one of several reasons Las Vegas is dying.
It got intentionally normalized by the Grand Old Party of Christian Family Values because it is very profitable.
I will forever be thankful for a cruise I went on when I was in my teens.
There were unrestricted gambling slot machines, I had 20SEK, I started gambling at one machine, and won! I tripled my money, so I had 60SEK.
Instead of being sensible and buying snacks, I gambled more later, and lost it all.
It was not a large amount of money, but it still stings, and have put me off of gambling ever since.
It was probably the best return I have ever gotten from any money.
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.
Gamblers: I love the thrill that I could lose it all!
Gamers: RNGesus is a punk ass bitch
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 don’t gamble often but when I do I treat it as an entertainment expense. I can budget $60 to going to a casino or for buying tickets to something. When the $60 is gone I am done.
It’s all about $/hr of entertainment value.
That said I haven’t really been gambling for 20 years.
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.
I’d say that’s 20SEK well spent to learn a valuable lesson.
I never understood how people can enjoy gambling or be addicted to it.
Yeah I get that it’s exciting, but spending money on actual goods and services can be exciting too.
If you find gambling using a $1000 exciting, wouldn’t using that $1000 on other things be even more exciting?
Winning money is only fun because said money can be used for fun. It wouldn’t really be a problem if it was points instead of currency. If what gives gambling its excitement is spending your winnings, just spend money from the get go.
Idk, I just don’t get it.
Same, but many people are wired very, very differently from you and I here.
The diversity of the human mind is truly the most wonderful and terrifying thing about our species.
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 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?
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.
I don't gamble, I just buy pallets of equipment at auction in the hopes that I can resell it for a profit.
I dont gamble, I just bid on abandoned storage units and hope for the best.
I swear half of these gambling websites end their ads with "this is not a gambling website". I've never looked into in (because fuck that I'm not going on those sites) but I assume it's some mobile game shit where you buy gems or something and can't actually win anything tangible.
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.
Prediction markets is a fancy term for gambling and they exist because that type of gambling was legalized.
They want to deny it is gambling to avoid laws that directly reference gambling by name just like 'ride sharing' is taxis but doesn't want to follow laws that use the word 'taxi' in the text. Oh, and to trick gambling addicts into gambling.
The last time I looked, there were also legal casinos using a similarly transparent schtick.
What they do is that you don't directly win money from gambling. Everything is presented as if it's related to a sweepstakes, because sweepstakes are a legal version of gambling.
It works something like, you can pay to get entries in a sweepstakes, and I think you can even gamble with your sweepstakes entries to try to get more entries. Then because you entered the sweepstakes, you automatically win, and the sweepstakes pays out in fake money like gems. Then you can also gamble with the fake money. Finally, the casinos will buy the fake money from you using real money.
I may not have gotten this explanation exactly right, but it's in the ballpark.
They push that phrase so hard because it is gambling. They’re trying to skirt the legal definition, but the common sense definition would disagree.
I'm really hoping that legislation will be in place to curb this sort of thing by the time my kids are old enough to want to watch sports. I'm not thrilled at the prospect of those ads marinating in their young brains, and I don't relish the thought of trying to explain to a credulous 8-year-old that we can't win millions of dollars betting on hockey games.
Hoping is different than expecting, unfortunately.
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.
They do have that in Australia
But of course, they rely on people thinking "yeah, but that won't happen to me because I'm somehow different"
They're obviously the dumbest
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.
If you can't watch a sport without a wager, then you're into gambling, not sports.
How exciting is horse racing on its own? (It isn't)
I switched to UK streams of F1 for this exact reason. It’s out of hand.
I just can't imagine pulling something like cable TV into your home intentionally.
Imagine paying for TV that has tons of ads in it.
During a brief period when Youtube's anti-adblocker tech was one step ahead of my adblockers, I had to watch 20 seconds of an ad before I could skip it. And that alone was filling me with a dangerous amount of rage. (The only thing it made me want to buy was lots of explosives.) I really don't understand how people tolerate watching normie TV where a solid 1/3 of the airtime is dedicated to obnoxious ads.
In case you still thought the sports industry isn't evil...
Practically all sports stars are perfectly happy to advertise and work with scummy companies (like aforementioned gambling companies), and countries like Israel or UAE. As long as they're paid nice money.
Same for sports events. They'll all happily take money to advertise billionaire pedophiles' companies or terror states.
It's almost impossible to spend any money on sports-related events or merchandise without supporting gambling or contributing towards genocide. Maybe some local ones? Maybe...?
Let's all cut cable TV.
Oh wait, I already did.
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.
Its not about spending money, its about anticipation and excitement. It turns something that people enjoy like watching sport, and gives a personal investment. It goes from, "id like carolina to win" to "it means something to me if Carolina wins."
People who are addicted to gambling arent gambling to buy things. Theyre addicted to gambling. Theyre gambling so they can gamble more. Its like people who are addicted to drugs. Eventually the soft stuff doesnt hit like it used to, and the need bigger doses or harder drugs. They need to win more money, so they can gamble more money.
Things to note.
This is really just a common foot in the door tactic. We didn't have such widespread issue with gambling couple of years prior - now we're desensitised to it appearing within ads. Its sad, because no one really wanted this; and because of it, all we are getting in return is manipulation.