“Non posso sfuggire a queste macchine”: i tossicodipendenti raccontano enormi perdite dal gioco d’azzardo delle slot

‘Weak people are weak’ isn’t news.

Give cunts free reign to exploit and guess what, they exploit.

These games are incredibly addicting. I did the matched betting thing (not going to link here) which basically runs you through all the new customer deals for all of the online bookies and casinoes to extract the best possible value from the bonus cash they give you to try to get you hooked.

If you aren’t able to see through the flashing lights and combos popping up on your screen, it looks like you’re playing a game where you’re slowly building up an insane combo, just mere clicks away from hitting a jackpot. In fact, you’re £50 down and still rolling a thousand-sided die hoping to land on 1000. It deliberately gives you small wins to keep you hooked. £10 win on your 100th 50p roll? The game screams as if you’ve won £1000.

I can completely understand how people get addicted to these, and it is pure evil how they exploit human emotion to turn an odds-based game into a rollercoaster of dopamine.

We need a ban on something (and I don’t have a good solution for this), to stop people from getting emotionally hooked on these. Ban the crazy animations that are hiding the low-odds dice roll, or something.

Edit: If you regularly play online national lottery instant win games you can prove it to yourself. Go to settings, turn off animations on instant win games. When you buy a scratchcard, it will now instantly tell you the outcome. Play once or twice and you’ll never play them again. The odds haven’t changed.

I don’t mind mandating that people should be able to opt-out of things like this. But using these cases as an example to restrict everyones freedom always strikes me as appealing to the lowest common denominator.

We can and should instead allow addicts of various kinds to force a decline on their cards for this sort of thing, and to perhaps also to opt-out of cash withdrawals, or some other similar measure.

I have no problem with demanding a company that sells an addictive product or service cooperate with and comply with a regime that allows people to opt-out in the knowledge they cannot help themselves and will keep attempting to buy the thing.

But not everyone has these problems. Plenty of people can lightly gamble, or have a beer, or take drugs recreationally, and many other things, in moderation. Those who can’t do deserve our help in both recovery and in removing their option to indulge, since they have clearly begged us to do that for them, but we don’t have to remove it generally.

We can allow alcoholics to opt in to being barred, and unable to purchase alcohol, for example, and punish companies that ignore this, rather than banning alcohol.

That seems to me to be the humane and proportionate response, rather than a disproportionate and authoritarian one, or one callous to the needs of people who are victims of their addiction.

It may be a little complicated, and perhaps even costly, but there again the solution is a pigouvian tax. The cost of administrating the bar to alcoholics can be passed on to a general taxation on alcohol, and so on. That is a proportionate response. Almost all addicts have moments of clarity where they want to quit, and so allowing them an easy way to opt in to a blacklist resolves this problem.

Frankly if Starmers digital ID goes through then this seems an apt usage of it. May as well if it’s there, even with some misgivings over the concept in general.

Then just mandate ID for all addictive or potentially dangerous sales, and allow an easy opt-in blacklist. Then your ID will tell the seller to decline. In terms of removing ones self from the list, it should be relatively arduous, but maybe possible.

Problem solved.