Hard News: Dopamine psychosis and other great nights out
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I'm pretty sure they'd take my bet, under similar circumstances. ;)
Last year I went to a casino in Niagara Falls, with the idea of seeing how much fun I could have for $20 Canadian. The cheapest table I could find had a $5 minimum bet, and I figured I wasn't going to have much fun if I lost my $20 on one hand.
So I went and looked at the pokies. I've never understood pokies in NZ, they're all grapes and cards and bananas and I have no idea how you win or lose. Actually, I have a good idea how to lose, just put money into it and push the button.
I found a blackjack machine and played that happily for an hour and left with some change and about $10 of alcohol inside me.
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Going back to Russell's post
After 14 years, North Carolina has legislated a sinking lid -- to zero -- on pokies. The problems there have been such that the state Senate has passed such a measure five times since 2000 -- but each time the House, under the direction of (Democrat) Speaker Jim Black, refused to vote on it. The game was up when it emerged that Black was taking campaign contributions from ... guess which industry?
Once that was cleared up, the House voted 114-1 for the ban
The point " that we should be tolerant of other people's vices " i a little disingenuous seeing as we never saw "we the people" marching on Parliament demanding Casinos and pokie machines it was those with a vested interest wanting these things. If we were to "insist" that our govt. banned all the bad stuff, tobacco, alcashol, gambling etc I doubt that we would have produced the surpluses that have enabled the Govt. to introduce the social benefits that it has. My point? I guess every silver lining must have it's cloud.
P.S. my keyboard just invented a new word "alcashol" might be better with an "E" "Alcashole, a person that cannot hold their liquor"
Things go better with an "E" ;-) -
left with some change and about $10 of alcohol inside me
Yeah, but that booze probably cost them only $1-2. Why do they give away the free drinks? Because they want to keep you there gambling ....
The only way the Casino can lose is if not enough punters come in.
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Can't we get an "edit" facility so we can correct our silly mistakes? I missed a "<"
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The only way the Casino can lose is if not enough punters come in
Actually I think I took a few $$ off a big casino/hotel in Reno the week after Burning Man - by the simple expedient of staying in one of their USD45 hotel rooms and not gambling a single cent. The place was actually cheaper than Motel 6.
Kyle: I meant that the revenues from pokies should be forced down to match those from a pool table, not the other way. As in 81stcolumn's mums pub.
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Another point* is that these parasites use every Applied Psychology trick in the book to make the punter think he's got a chance. They are clinical about it.
I just groan when I see my friends claiming they were "so close" to winning on the scratchies.
Yeah. Like there is some 'chance' that you weren't only 1 thing away from a $10,000 prize...
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Whereas the reality looks more like an abattoir. But I'm not able to deny middle Auckland its night out at Sky City,however little it appeals to me. I just despise the low-rent versions that sprout like corner dairies where the poor people live.
I'd be guessing that you are more likely to visit the first, but not the second. That you can afford to splurge and have a good night whenever you feel like it. That you earn enough money, you are not poor.
If you were poor, a pensioner living on a fixed income you could not splurge on a whim. You might even spend a measly $20 a week playing pokies and having a quiet & boring chat with your mates, watching every cent. You might only win back $400 once a year, but on that night it is a good fun night for you and your mates. Now how about the government (backed by self important middle class do-gooders) make that illegal - you get $20 extra a week, to have an infinite number of boring nights with the boys for the rest of your life (living on a measly government pension). How incredibly depressing, you are going to be less than pleased. You might do something rash like partake in criminal gambling and then you are a criminal, criminally spending $20 a week in the hope of having a good night out with your mates.
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Yeah, but that booze probably cost them only $1-2. Why do they give away the free drinks? Because they want to keep you there gambling ...
Actually we paid for the alcohol. I'm not sure someone who bets one nickel at a time on the blackjack machine is enough of a high roller to earn the freebies.
Kyle: I meant that the revenues from pokies should be forced down to match those from a pool table, not the other way.
Yeah I got that. Just laying down some aggression so no one swings the other way.
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BTW - I am going to need mood altering substances if Chris Knox is incorporated into any political advertising next year, that or ear plugs.
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Russell, I got that you don't like pokies. I don't either. What I don't get is why you think it's so different from other vices which you clearly do not have a problem with. So far the only argument you have presented is that they target the poor. But guess what? Every vice targets the poor, except for the really expensive ones. Hence my insistence that you take a hit on one of your vices when you insist someone else does the same. You drink whiskey? Think of how many poor people that particular drug has ruined? I suggest it's waaay more than the pokies. It has probably aided and abetted the pokies too, it's a natural ally.
And you miss the extremely obvious flipside too. A lot of people LIKE gambling on pokies. Something about it does it for them. The vast majority of them do not lose everything that way. They are not ruined. They are just entertained. Just because you don't doesn't make it impossible or inconceivable that most gamblers get genuine enjoyment from gambling. They're playing a game. Their enjoyment is not irrelevant.
The mere existence of a small minority of people who are harmed by being unable to control their usage of something is not enough argument to ban it. I'll have you know I squandered 90% of everything I earned as a child playing computer games in arcades. I never ever 'won', always the house took my money. But I loved it. It was social, it was engaging. It killed time. Just because the arcade was exploiting 'sound psychological principles' to 'make huge profits from children' doesn't make what they were doing was wrong.
I imagine you have spent huge sums of money over the years enjoying music that you have paid for. Of course it cost the production company waaay less than they charged you. Of course the nature of music targets the mass market, many of whom are poor and would be better off feeding their kids with the money they spent on CDs. Of course they target children. Of course they ruthlessly promote it in drinking establishments. A mate of mine spent almost his entire student loan on his extremely impressive music collection, a loan that he still has not paid off to this day, ten years later. Personally I think you are both totally nuts. I would always just download a ripz. But I'm not about to say that there should be restrictions on how and where music can be sold just because there are some junkies. The world shouldn't revolve around junkies. A caring world will help them out, within reason. But for god's sake let people who aren't junkies, the majority, get on with their shit.
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The world shouldn't revolve around junkies. A caring world will help them out, within reason. But for god's sake let people who aren't junkies, the majority, get on with their shit.
I presume that's not your argument.
I can see a valid argument that things that are addictive shouldn't be banned as long as they're not too bad, or only affect a small proportion of the population in an adverse way.
But an argument that a substance/activity shouldn't be banned no matter how detrimental it is on society? No matter what?
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Given that destroying their friends, family, career and health are not enough to stop addicts, how is it possible that any punishment the state can impose will to the trick?
All prohibition does is make criminals of addicts and those who are not addicted, but derive fun from the activity. Prohibition is merely an easy sop to the something-must-be-done crowd, a boon to providers of alternatives and a joy to fun hating killjoys. It doesn't work
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Kyle, that's an extreme position. I take the position that if something you do harms other people directly, then it's wrong. The practicalities are obviously complex, when you consider the extremely minor harms that can be inflicted - like stopping people making any noise because others can hear it, for instance. Clearly there's an acceptable level of harm weighed up against the enjoyment of many.
The question at hand is whether the harm of pokies outweighs the good of it. And it's a very complex question. Surely losing all your money, particularly if you have dependents, is a harm. How many people does it afflict, out of how many people are gambling? Set against that is the pleasure of all the people, harmed or otherwise, who used the pokies. Can that be easily measured?
One measure is simply that they choose to do it. I think it's extremely patronizing to suggest that people have no rationality about this matter. The problem gamblers may have some bizarre affliction, fine, but the rest? The person who gambles to a set limit well short of everything they have? Is this person somehow less human, less capable of deciding that what they did was enjoyable? Gamblers that I have spoken to just seem to love it. With a passion that I only experience in my loves. They are still realistic about how much they can afford to lose, but they really really want to. They get a big buzz out of it.
As a non-gambler myself, I found it extremely hard to get, until hanging out with a very good friend of mine in Australia. I went with him to the races once, and the casino many times. He displayed the kind of excitement about going that you only see in people who are doing something they really love. He was quivering with anticipication. When I asked him what the thrill was, he described many of the other enticements of the occasion, like the girls, the drinking, the socializing, the spending a silly lazy day in the sun indulging yourself, the sights, the smells, but above all, the thrill of the gamble. I got all the other stuff, but the thrill of the gamble didn't hit me. But to see him at the races made me realize how harmless his thrill was, and how....thrilling..... it was. I was actually envious that he could get such a buzz from it. It made me feel like a boring old wanker that I couldn't get that thrill.
That put it in perspective. It's just not my buzz. But for many people it's a very big buzz, and mostly a harmless one. At the end of a day's racing he'd have spent $100 on average, same as a night at the casino. I'd have spent the same, playing the arcade games, going to a movie, having drinks in the club, etc. All of which was equally frivolous, and sadly didn't give me anywhere near as much enjoyment as he seemed to get. I drew the line at keeping him company at the pokie machines, which he explained to me were addictive because you could gamble for so damned long on them. He didn't love them quite so much, but he said if he only had small change some days he'd play them for a few hours, quite merrily entertaining himself.
I'm not convinced at all that the world is made a better place by taking that thrill away from tens of thousands of people, because a far smaller number of people can't control their addiction. The reason I'm not convinced is because the same principle applied to many other vices doesn't seem to hold, many of which appear far more harmful than gambling.
If the comeback is to say that at least we shouldn't increase the number of vices by which people can destroy their lives, then I have to say it's an extremely poor comeback. That is a virtual halt to the development of all enjoyable human activity. It's the kind of thing old people who don't enjoy very much any more would insist on, because it costs them nothing. They think. Until someone invents something they might like and some sap gets addicted to it. Which, ironically, happens all the time. Medical marijuana, for instance. Just because some people can't control a dope habit, lots of old people, who are dying anyway, can't have the pain relief, or, shock horror, get pleasantly high on their death bed.
If there's any hole in my argument that I can openly confess to it is how to deal with vice and children. I don't even pretend to have the answers to that other than to be totally conservative and say kids shouldn't be allowed anything they might get addicted to, which accounts for about 95% of the things I used to enjoy doing when I was actually a child.
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I take the position that if something you do harms other people directly, then it's wrong.
So designing a pokie machine to be psychologically addictive, knowing that some relatively set proportion of it's users will be directly harmed by that designed addictiveness is, therefore, wrong?
Fine, let's keep reducing the number of pokies.
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So designing a pokie machine to be psychologically addictive, knowing that some relatively set proportion of it's users will be directly harmed by that designed addictiveness is, therefore, wrong?
That's an interesting perspective Tim, I hadn't thought about it from the creation/provision of the machine before.
Presumably we could still say that the amount of harm that you are creating is counteracted by the the amount of pleasure/fun that you are creating. Or make a judgement as to whether that is the case.
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Yeah, course you could make that judgement. Better yet, you could emblazon all your pokies with big "Can you afford this bet?" signs. Or program them to create the occasional toilet break. Or put them in an area bathed with sun light, where you can watch people, socialise, smell nice smells.
Do stuff that would make them possibly even more enjoyable to many people, but likely decrease the addictiveness of them.
Funny how the industry doesn't do that.
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Russell, I got that you don't like pokies. I don't either. What I don't get is why you think it's so different from other vices which you clearly do not have a problem with. So far the only argument you have presented is that they target the poor.
And I don't get why you think it's the same. Just because you choose to use the same word for them all doesn't make all those activities the same. As I said before, not even all forms of gambling are the same.
To take the most obvious example, according to the Problem Gambling Foundation, pokies now deliver more problem gambling referrals than all other forms of gambling combined: by a factor of four. This, from a form of gambling that didn't exist at the beginning of the 1990s.
This is a form of making money (for the operators) that is essentially based on psychological deception. If these deceptions weren't built in to the way the machines operate, there would be little or no profit in them.
What level of regulation would you favour? Would you rather not have had the Gambling Act 2003 and have double the number of machines again by now? Would you have no restrictions on the number of machines that can be placed in a community? No electronic monitoring? No compulsory notices telling people what the odds really are?
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Russell, I got that you don't like pokies. I don't either. What I don't get is why you think it's so different from other vices which you clearly do not have a problem with.
I am with you Ben about no vice being especially better or worse than another, and that people can rationally and safely enjoy almost anything that is considered fun. And talking about banning is a little self righteous if we don't want to ban similar things that we enjoy.
I think the problem I have is that they are machines specifically designed by humans using psychological principles to engender addiction. I have no complaint with people who enjoy them, or the fact that they do, its just the people that create and promote and profit from them. The way they go about it just seems greedy and insidious. I know this describes many vices. And I don't really have any answers. What about notices like on the cigarette packets, "WARNING: this machine may trigger addictive tendencies".
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I evidently should have refreshed the page before hitting "Post Reply"...
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So designing a pokie machine to be psychologically addictive, knowing that some relatively set proportion of it's users will be directly harmed by that designed addictiveness is, therefore, wrong?
As I just said at length, no. The small number who receive harm doesn't outweigh the large number who get net enjoyment. And I am taking into account that the harm is severe compared to the enjoyment.
This might seem cold and calculating, but we make these kinds of decisions every single day. People are killed in cars all the time, but the benefit of having them outweighs that. Some people have severe allergic reactions to medication, but we still allow that medication to cure things that would otherwise just take a bit longer for the body to clear up by itself. A lot of TV is of mild entertainment to many, and highly offensive to just a few.
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If cars were designed to kill. If medicines were designed to kill a proportion of their users. If creating offensive tv was not controlled (to a degree that doesn't satisfy either end of the viewing spectrum) then you'd have a point.
These things have their harms as an unwanted byproduct of their usefullness. In the case of cars and medicines their unwanted side effects are designed out of them, to some degree at least. In the design of pokies their socially unwanted side effects are deliberately designed into them. And the industry lobbies pretty hard to avoid putting any kind of warnings onto them. In effect they want to maximise not the pleasure or usefullness of the product, but the addictiveness.
If cars and medicines were designed that way, I suspect you wouldn't be happy about the situation.
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As I just said at length, no. The small number who receive harm doesn't outweigh the large number who get net enjoyment.
It would be interesting to tot up the number of people who feel harmed by the proliferation of pokies in poor suburbs and compare that to the number who claim enjoyment.
But, let's put it another way. Say there are no pokies in New Zealand -- would you actively bring them in to enhance this public enjoyment you speak of?
Knowing, as you would with hindsight, that they create far more addicts than any other form of gambling -- whilst delivering a markedly worse return to even non-addicted punters -- and that the supposed community benefits are often a bunch of bullshit?
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And I don't get why you think it's the same
It's the same principle. Unless you don't believe in any principles behind public policy, then tell me by what principle you distinguish between vices. I can accept that your principles are totally piecemeal, and that you don't agree with pokies because they have caused more problem gambling (whether we actually agree on that point or not), but I can't see how you then advocate the availability of any other new vices, like various pills that were also not around in the early 90s. The number of people who got sick from a party pill would only need to be 1 for the proportional increase to be undefinedly large. So what? It's still 1 person.
To take the most obvious example, according to the Problem Gambling Foundation, pokies now deliver more problem gambling referrals than all other forms of gambling combined: by a factor of four. This, from a form of gambling that didn't exist at the beginning of the 1990s.
So it's a more popular form of gambling now. I'm not sure what you're trying to prove by that. I don't play Frogger anymore either.
They say 3% of gamblers have a problem. Why exactly are the other 97% not allowed their fun because of that? Was it a different number before the pokies?
What level of regulation would you favour?
Now for the hard questions.
Would you rather not have had the Gambling Act 2003 and have double the number of machines again by now?
Is there any evidence that there isn't just a fairly fixed number of people who become problem gamblers?
Would you have no restrictions on the number of machines that can be placed in a community?
I'd leave that to the particular community you are talking about to decide. Personally I'd vote against pokies near me, but if I got outvoted then I'd have to swallow that.
No electronic monitoring?
Not sure exactly what you mean. That could mean a lot of things. Are you talking about limiting the losses a person can take? If so, I'd be in favor of that, to mitigate the harm problem gamblers can cause themselves. It would be much like laws against serving alcohol to the intoxicated.
No compulsory notices telling people what the odds really are?
Now there's a tricky one. Yeah, I reckon warning labels are a very good idea, but gambling's a really tricky one because they always invent tricky new games. Perhaps just an 'Average cost per hour' for each game. That would put it in stark relief. But I can see loopholes.
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It would be interesting to tot up the number of people who feel harmed by the proliferation of pokies in poor suburbs and compare that to the number who claim enjoyment.
Yes it would. "How harmed" would also be important to establish. I feel harmed every time I hear gangsta rap, but only a very very little bit.
Say there are no pokies in New Zealand -- would you actively bring them in to enhance this public enjoyment you speak of?
Hell no. They're lame. But I wouldn't stop people doing it, so long as the communities concerned were OK with it.
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I'd leave that to the particular community you are talking about to decide. Personally I'd vote against pokies near me, but if I got outvoted then I'd have to swallow that.
i guess that is part of the problem - most communities didn't get to decide. how about we make every outlet go through a full resource consent process to make sure that every community does have a say in this.
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