Tickling the Synapses

"The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling."

-Ambrose Bierce

The weather's still looking a little froggy out there this morning, not a great thing given that I'm supposed to fly the Mighty Columbia back from Binghamton later today after they spent a couple days fixing an oxygen leak.

I'm generally okay flying in bad weather (except thunderstorms and ice), but that's only about a 14 minute flight from KBGM to KELM. You take off, turn west in the climb, and immediately start loading approach plates for Elmira, leveling off, pulling back engine and prop, picking up the latest weather at the field, switching approach frequencies, all more or less at the same time. It's a challenge on a clear day; more so if it stays like this.

Thinking this morning about the addiction that, by all appearances, is sweeping our country right now--online gambling. Playing fields are ringed with mini-billboards for Draft Kings. Every third ad on TV is either for a sports betting app or playing the prediction market. Announcers during ballgames talk casually about the betting implications of what's going on down on the field. Our chief doorman Junior waves his phone at us as we pass and mention we're going to a sports bar to watch the Bills, to show us he has money on Buffalo to cover the spread.

And all this gambling, all this money on the line, leads fans to question things that happen on the field that conveniently result in the house winning the bets on that game. For instance, two weeks ago the hapless freshman quarterback of NC State, on the last play of the game and leading against favorite Vanderbilt, managed to fumble in the end zone rather than just taking the safety to end the game. Result? Vandy wins and covers the spread. The sports books rejoice. The fans question whether this was an honest mistake, particularly with the gobs of money being handed to college football players these days. Did you realize the Oregon Ducks pay their players roughly $50 million a year? Me either. Some real moral hazards there.

A blogger I read mentioned a book by an MIT professor entitled Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, by Natasha Dow Schull. One premise is that the gambling industry has figured out how to tickle our synapses in a way that draws us into the game, and if we have addictive tendencies keeps us there. The whole business model is built upon the addicts; hence the irony of those "Gambling Problem?" public service blurbs that accompany ads for gambling apps. Hell, these things owe their existence to folks with gambling problems, and are designed to draw all of us into the door, and then find ways to keep the addicts in the game until they're drained. You didn't think all that advertising, and all those fancy casinos, were funded by folks innocently betting a couple bucks on the Braves, did you?

Another interesting point that's emerged in studies of gambling is that the core audience for, say, apps that provide virtual slot machine opportunities are mostly bored young stay-at-home mothers, who perceive their life to be sufficiently crappy that they use the interaction as an escape. They also show up in the online gaming spheres such as World of Warcraft. Gambling and gaming as escape, carefully crafted now to draw in the bored and the sad and keep them there. It says a lot about the state of our country right now.

Despite my poor addictive personality, gambling's never done it for me. I can look at the basic economics of the thing and realize the only way the enterprise makes money is if the house wins, and the only way to keep the rubes playing is to let someone win big every now and then so the folks who never took statistics will hang onto hope that one day they'll be the ones holding the giant cardboard check. I'll stick to Jameson's--at least I understand that form of self-defeating behavior.

Time for my first call, on a complicated tax issue. Far preferable to drafting witness lists, which is my next project in line.