And any active investment platforms are not different at all. A lot of matketing budget is spent to make people believe they can earn money by trading.

I have worked in the betting industry for several years. And the reason I'm writing is to tell you that while (2) sound logical, it was not used during my time in the industry. Or to be more precise, of course the odds are adjusted all the time to balance the market, prevent arbitrage etc, but it was also very common to have a 'loss leader bet', usually on the favourite, where the betting company would take a loss or make very little money if the favourite wins (but if that happens the customers still don't make a lot, because the odds are already low, and betting on a favourite is not a winning strategy because the real fav loss probability is higher than the odds would suggest). OTOH what is also often done is when 'real odds' are very high (low probability), the odds that are offered are way lower than the probability would suggest. So if 'real odds' are 100:1, the company would offer 50:1, so, even taking into account the company margins, you as a customers are never offered anything close to the real probability and as a consequence unless you are exceptionally good can never make money (and if you do your are banned).

Strategy (2) doesn't tell you how to come up with the initial prices, and bookies can potentially lose a significant amount from giving "bad" initial prices. If an individual is winning a lot of money from a bookie repeatedly because of these bad initial prices, then it is a sign that they might have a better model than the bookie, and so it is in the bookie's interest to ban them, since sports betting is a zero-sum game: every dollar you win from a bookie is a dollar that the bookie loses.

In a similar vein, many people close to gamblers suffer serious consequences from the addiction.

Did you miss the point about negative impact on others?

So if your degenerate father gambles away your college fund, that's your personal responsibility?

You can blame both the house and the gambler you know.

Yes, they chose their genes and the structure of their brain after all, how irresponsible of them! /s

In general, something that happens at scale and consistently is not an individual problem.

You have whole armies of very well funded designers of things like processed food, or games, working to deliberate find the faults in human brains, and to make politicians make the laws that lets them do it legally, and you say it's the fault of the individual that falls for it?

I'm fairly okay with legalizing everything but absolutely banning advertising it.

Which is what we should be doing with gambling: no advertising, as opposed to now where everybody ad break has a celebrity endorsing the intelligence you clearly have when you choose (betting platform).

The war on drugs should never have happened. It's been used a tool of foreign and domestic terror and control for a century. It was designed and popularized by corrupt people who stood to gain wealth from restricting the freedom of others.

To your implied point, drug addictions similarly ravish communities, destroy lives, and in the case of drugs like fentanyl, legalization effectively makes it easy to acquire extremely potent and discreet poisons, which has a huge potential impact for violence.

We can paint a similar story for gun violence. We can tie drugs, gambling and guns together even more tightly when we look into where cities approve permits for gambling centers, where most liquor stores pop up, selective enforcement and scandals like the Iran-Contra affair [0].

It's important to have a consistent position on all of these topics, so I thank you for raising this point. So all of that said, I think drug consumption/manufacturing/distribution, guns and gambling should generally all be legal at a high level, but we must dispense with the racist and classist implementations of these systems within our societies, and we should have sensible evaluation and certification programs in place for access to different stratifications.

You should be required to periodically prove medical and psychological fitness, as well as operational certification, for certain powerful substances. Similarly, we need sensible restrictions on gambling and guns [1].

The reality is that with freedom comes responsibility. Without responsibility, unrestricted freedom leads to anarchy or a post-capitalist nightmare. One of the main points of government is to balance these freedoms across individuals, communities and society at large, in order to maximize the well-being and self-determination of the people, while allowing for progress and innovation.

I'm curious to hear your own position.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair

[1] To be clear, I am very pro 2nd amendment [1] and am not calling for a ban on anything or for the State to maintain a monopoly on violence and power.

"Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary" - Karl Marx

The Judeo-Christian god does not exist, nor any other god, so I'm not sure what rights you're referring to. Are you referring to human rights? We don't need a religion to justify those.

Anyway, you said your argument accounts for it, but didn't actually follow through and demonstrate why that is. How does your argument take into account the aforementioned power imbalances?

By customers you mean "people to sell stolen watches to"? Cause if that is the question, neither of these is a good place. Affluent people wont buy obviously stolen watches directly in the restaurant, they will go through middleman that makes them look legit.

And people being there to bet wont be buying watches that much either.

Hanging out at the same restaurant is a terrible idea for a watch thief, you will be caught over time.

That’s not an issue for the loan shark.

Rights are merely a simplification of complex interactions. Societies are more focused on what benefits themselves than such simplification.

The minimal effectiveness of enhanced interrogation plus the desire of the population not to risk being so interrogated means people are generally apposed to such. Tracking down a nuclear threat is considered something of an exception to this stance by the average person.