[Mimmy]

Agreed, what a way to sour a decent message with an awful example.

> Government, acting in the best interest of their citizens, were trying to curb an addictive substance. CEO of generic tobacco / drug / oil / gambling company, realizing that this would hurt their profits, decided that the best way forward was to effectively bribe those in power to put their company's profits over the well-being of society.

If this is true, I'd like to thank the author for inadvertently pointing out the real source of the sports gambling problem: people like Jason Robins.

We don't have a sports gambling problem, we have a greedy CEO bribing lawmakers problem.

[tilne]

I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but I disagree that Robins is to blame. If the system enables this kind of behavior, there will always be someone willing to take advantage. If not Robins, then the next shameless profiteer.

[WastingMyTime89]

Ah yes, the famous "if it’s not me someone else would do it therefore the system is to blame and not me". What a great logical fallacy. Your actions remain immoral even if there is plenty of other people ready to be as immoral as you are.

[jjoonathan]

Both. We need both. Robins should be punished and the system should be fixed. Obviously. It's absolutely wild that we had to arrive here instead of starting here.

Personal responsibility is a good principle to live by but a dogshit principle for system design. It's a transparent but common ploy by the corrupt: "let's not fix the system and instead toss a few scapegoats to the plebs while we continue to rob them blind."

[bumby]

If we can agree that humans are imperfect, systems help nudge people towards more perfect.

I sure wish I had perfect willpower to avoid bad foods. But, alas, I am imperfect in that regard so I create a system that prevents bad foods from being in my house. The end result is that my behavior trends toward more perfect than had that system not be in place.

Moral philosophical discussions are fine and we can lament about the moral shortcomings of ourselves and others, but I think the systems argument is more pragmatic in creating real changes in behavior and outcomes.

[chromoblob]

This system is implementation of your willpower, though.

[hiatus]

The feedback is only post-facto though. Laws don't prevent behavior, they only describe consequences.

[bumby]

FWIW, I think laws can be part of a system, but they’re not the only implantation

[bumby]

What if the system is designed by somebody else?

[drewcoo]

Introducing morality is shifting the goalposts.

Besides, complaining about immoral people doesn't fix the problem. Changing the law might.

[WastingMyTime89]

That’s mixing cause and consequences. A society is shaped by its members not the other way round. The law can punish the most egregious transgressions. It won’t set the global standard. Education and social behaviour set the standards. If you want behaviour to disappear, stop treating them as acceptable.

[keiferski]

All this indicates is that the problem is at the system level. It doesn’t mean the actor is somehow less culpable just because “someone else would have done it anyway.”

[LoFiSamurai]

Correct. There are also plenty of people who realize that while things are possible within a system, they choose not to do them for moral / ethical reasons.

[scott_w]

Not to put too fine a point on it but we are talking about the CEO of a gambling company here…

[marcosdumay]

And anyway, the actions needed to fix the system are almost certainly punishing those people and the people that refuse to punish them.

[foogazi]

> All this indicates is that the problem is at the system level.

The system is people just like the CEO - it’s a people problem

[hliyan]

There is something deeply troubling about the sentiment "if I'm incentivised to act a certain way, that is the way I will act". This is not how normal human beings think, and it is not the type of human being that society should be designed for.

[Tyrannosaur]

It is possible, and often appropriate, to simultaneously denounce both a system that is easily abused and people who abuse such systems.

[plufz]

I dont disagree that the main problem is systemic/political but all systems have flaws, people should always have a higher moral standard than simply following the law. Robins is to blame but not alone.

[acegopher]

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Not everything that isn't illegal is ethical.

[foogazi]

> If the system enables this kind of behavior

The “system” enables any kind of behavior - people are free to attempt anything they can imagine, consequences are applied after the fact

[sublinear]

> We don't have a sports gambling problem, we have a greedy CEO bribing lawmakers problem.

These are not mutually exclusive.

[spenczar5]

I think its a joke; that sort of either/or reductionism is the entire point of the original article.

[Gunax]

Whether that decision is in the best interests is a matter of opinion. They did what representative democracy encourages, which is to have a dialogue with their representatives.

[nonameiguess]

This doesn't seem like a fair characterization of what happened. I don't intend to shill for Draft Kings or anything, but lawmakers weren't bribed into changing anything. The Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports gambling, and that was based on a lawsuit brought by Chris Christie as governor of New Jersey, not on behalf of Internet gambling sites, but because he was pissed that Nevada casinos were allowed to host sportsbooks but Atlantic City casinos were not.

[Mimmy]

Are you sure?

> Since 2016, FanDuel and DraftKings alone have donated more than $2.6 million to state politicians and political parties, according to data maintained by OpenSecrets, a campaign finance watchdog. The companies have spent another $114 million to try to influence state ballot measures to legalize sports betting.

> Industry lobbyists, for example, dazzled lawmakers with projections about the billions of dollars that states could expect to collect in taxes from sports betting — projections that, at least so far, have often turned out to be wildly inflated, according to a Times analysis of state tax data.

> “It is time for your state to add iGaming,” Jason Robins, the chief executive of DraftKings, told lawmakers at a recent conference that his company sponsored. “Not in the future, but now.”

> “We needed a national strategy,” Mr. Kudon said in an interview, recalling his thought process at the time. “We need to go out there and pass 10, 15 bills and get ahead of this.”

> Mr. Kudon and his clients assembled an all-star team of lawyers and former government officials, including Martha Coakley, who had been the attorney general of Massachusetts.

> By the end of 2017, 19 states had passed bills legalizing fantasy sports. Almost all were written with help from Mr. Kudon’s team.

> Comments from the justices — including Chief Justice John G. Roberts, who in private practice had represented the American Gaming Association — suggested they were likely to overturn the federal ban.

And before you move the goal-posts, I'll note that this is just part of what is openly available. We recently found out about Clarence Thomas illegally accepting gifts from wealthy individuals. To assume that these lawsuits win or lose in a purely ethical, academic way without outside influence seems contrary to the evidence.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/business/sports-betting-l...

[trogdor]

>We recently found out about Clarence Thomas illegally accepting gifts from wealthy individuals.

No, we didn’t.

See https://reason.com/volokh/2023/06/22/justice-alito-shouldnt-...

[HardlyCurious]

Greedy CEO, greedy business owner, rich Nazis, foreign govt, there is no reason to focus the message on the variable in the room. The problem is greedy lawmakers who accept brides, full stop.

Fix the lawmakers and you stop all the bad faith influence.

[_Algernon_]

>Fix the lawmakers and you stop all the bad faith influence.

One-sentence simple solutions to one of the most complicated problems humanity faces. How do you propose to do that? Lawmakers are in charge of their own rules. There is no incentive to change their own incentive structure from within.

[HardlyCurious]

Well, it's a more limited scope then attempting to address every greedy person on earth with enough money to lobby.

Potential solutions could include direct democracy, line item veto, or maybe both?

I don't claim to have a solution, and that should be no reason to not address the topic of what problem society needs to solve.

[bumby]

>The problem is greedy lawmakers who accept brides, full stop.

Perhaps the problem is the system that makes such "bribes" legal.

[HardlyCurious]

Well, the brides aren't actually legal, they are just very difficult to prove.

Unless we want to make political donations illegal, how do you prove a donation to a politician as a bride instead of support for the politician whose politics you agree with?

One could make a claim that stuff like student loan forgiveness is unethical if it benefits those who voted for the party. Is it not illegal to use tax payer money to pay for votes? I think if any politician said, "anybody who votes for me will get a bonus in your tax refund this year" we would have no issue seeing how that is unethical.

[bumby]

I used quotations around the term bribe for a reason. By definition, if it's legal, it's not a bribe although it may walk like a duck and quack like a duck. One of the issues is an incentive problem: those who have the power to make it illegal are also those who benefit the most from it being legal.

>Unless we want to make political donations illegal

I think this is displaying dichotomous thinking. There's a lot of room between a political donation free-for-all and making political donations illegal. In between there are many proposals for a more mitigated approach. One being Lessig's idea of "Democracy Vouchers"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic%2C_Lost#Democracy_vou...

[HardlyCurious]

I think any reform to the process such as democracy vouchers are just a shell game. Ok, that money can only go to candidates or issue campaigns. Meanwhile other money will be spent in multitude of ways to shape public opinion. Where do the DNC and RNC get money from? What can they spend on? Just to name one of many entities with skin in the game that can't be funded by the democracy vouchers.

These reforms are going to end up just changing to rules to help one side or the other. Whether or not the ideas were formulated originally with that intent, by the time they get implemented they will be bent for that intent.

[bumby]

>other money will be spent in multitude of ways

Sure, and other systems would be needed to provide the necessary guardrails. At no point did I allude to the idea that one simple approach would be a panacea.