Can we do gambling ads next? We banned tobacco ads and then seemingly forgot the lesson that it's actually bad to let advertisers shove addictive and self-destructive products in the publics face, including to former addicts at risk of relapse.
Indeed. It has been heavily covered in Private Eye, as well. Labour is deeply in hock to the gambling industry. So much for "gambling is the curse of the working class".
Funny how you can buy British politicians for dirt cheap. In India or the US, it would take at least $100k-200k to get a single politician's attention at the bare minimum, while in the UK you can influence party positions for 25k quid.
In India one doesn’t just bribe a politician, one hires an expensive lawyer who “handles” the case.
The real bribery starts at the bottom of the pyramid.
Say you want a water connection. The rate is set on the size of the property, and each layer in the pyramid knows exactly how many square feet were approved and what their individual percentage will be.
And again, you can’t just bribe the fellow directly: you need to go through a trusted agent who acts as a cut-out between the briber and the bribed. This started after the Lok Ayukta started conducting raids. Who says our babus aren’t flexible and innovative?
How much do you estimate it would take to get a politician to flip their view on abortion, gun control, illegal immigration, health care? Seems like if it were "quite low" you'd see politicians flipping views all the time as one side or the other channelled money to them.
What we actually see is a lot of stasis, refusal to compromise, and politicians locked in with their party, which suggests it is pretty hard to influence politicians.
Where money is effective is using it to get politicians who agree with your view elected.
"Buying a politician to vote in a certain way" is not really how it works most of the time. It's more "buying time with a politician so you can give the best possible explanation for your case without any counter-argument". Turns out, that is surprisingly effective, especially when there isn't really an organised counter-movement with similar funds to get politicians ears.
Those are all hot-button issues that can make someone lose their seat. Unless you have enough money that they never have to work again, not going to happen. Almost nobody outside of HN notices the DMCA, but it’s there.
You don’t buy politicians to change their views on the circus items.
The only reason all those “issues” are issues is because they’re intended to distract the public from the actual stuff politicians are being bought for. Transferring wealth to their buyers.
80% of the politicians on both sides of the spectrum have the same beliefs about all those issues.
It'll be much harder to get a politician to flip on an issue that voters care about but much easier to get them to vote one way on an obscure regulation that most voters have never heard of.
Don't you need to donate at least $100k to influence senators or influence party positions in the US? Sure, you could "buy" a politician for cheaper, but you're not guaranteeing they will toe your line.
India is ridiculously expensive - bribes often amount to 50 lakh rupees to 1 crore + rupees, which amounts to roughly $50k-100k per politician. Not to mention bribery at the lower rungs of the ladder where everyone from the politician's toilet janitor all the way to the politician's chief of staff will demand their pound of flesh, usually in the tune of tens of lakhs of rupees (~$10k).
That's not a good thing.
From what I understand,
a lot of "cheaper" bribes in India
are for things that the government employees must do as a part of their jobs
so like a bribe for these government employees to do their job basically which still filters up to the highest levels of government.
Why would you agree to stick your neck out for something illegal on the cheap when you can wring the ordinary people to do your job?
All this is based on second hand information so please correct me where I am wrong. Also probably things are different in different parts of the country?
I'm not saying it's a good or a bad thing - bribery is bad, full stop. I wanted to draw a comparison between how expensive it is in India vs the UK, which means that a relatively smaller pool of individuals can actually afford to bribe in India vs the UK, which makes projects more concentrated in the hands of a few (which is still a lot in a bit country like India).
On the other hand, I was a member of the Treasury group and the Leaders group of the Tory party until recently, with just a "paltry" donation of £50k, which got me the ear of a sitting PM and regular meetings with the Chancellor. Good luck trying to get that kind of access in India or the US with the PM.
The cheaper bribes were a tangent, but just to show that doing business in India is actually more expensive than in the UK (where there are no such bribes).
US politians are routinely bought for numbers similar to the UK ones.
They will often vote in a way that their constituents do not want for ~10k in campaign contributions.
They didn't have to worry about the voters finding out about it (this is changing with alternative media) beacuse the same people bought ads on the major networks.
This is an interesting observation. Why do you think it is so much lower in UK Vs US? My guess: There are much less private donations in the national UK political system.
US congressional districts being an order of magnitude larger than UK constituencies probably has something to do with it. Also, there are significantly more MPs than representatives, so you have to swing more legislators to your side in the UK vs the US to get your pet policies adopted.
But you can get a seat at the table for negotiations if the Tories are in power and you're a part of the Leaders group or the Treasury group of donors. All for £50k.
Leaders group puts you in touch with the Tory party leader (who is often the PM if the Tories are in power). Treasury group invites you to meetings with the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
It's interesting that the UK has banned gambling ads online, but not on TV. Combined with the fact that they regulate cryptocurrencies as gambling, that's why you get no UK crypto ads online. For example, the PayPal UK front page doesn't even mention that you can buy crypto there.
Maybe this is blurring the line between online and TV, but TV streaming services definitely have gambling ads. A gambling ad literally just came on the Channel 4 player in front of me as I started typing this.
wait if crypto is gambling, then they don't tax the proceeds, right? but I'm pretty sure they tax it as capital gains..... so it's gambling for advertising purposes but capital investment for tax purposes...
I'm pretty sure all gambling winnings are tax free in the UK?
Thank the power of the horse racing/gaming/gambling lobby.
Many years ago when I lived there, I had an IG Index account - who market themselves as a "financial spread betting" service. At the time, you could buy/sell futures and options with them but it was presented in a way that emphasized that you were "spread betting" - but the mechanics were the exact same and expiries all lined up with the obvious counterparts in the liquid futures space.
So because you were NOT investing but gambling, "winnings" were tax free.
I just googled and they're still going - presumably still offering the same betting "service".
It's funny to see the efforts that scam and pure gambling services go to to try and present themselves as staid and serious "investment" business while IG Index offered access to well-regulated financial markets but kept reminding you that you were betting.
For those unaware, this comment is referring to premium bonds in the UK[1]. It is a very interesting system, I agree! But there are quite a few parts of the system that make it way more fair than a lottery.
Most obviously, it doesn't cost to enter. So the most you can "lose" is a missed interest income from putting the money in another source.
After that, it's definitely the fact that the algorithm is designed to both pay a certain percentage of people and always have specific return. [1]
You are also limited to how much you can enter to 50k.
With all that in mind, at the end of the day it feels like many small wins over time, with the super random chance of occasionally having a big-ish payout.
It's definitely designed to feel like a lottery, but in reality is way more akin to normal savings than a lottery.
In New Zealand this scheme was called "Bonus Bonds" and was wound up on 26 February 2024. Interest was charged on "wins" just like any other income. Apparently the average return was a paltry 1.5%.
Everyone knew someone's uncle who swore blind that he made heaps on the bonus bonds and had all his money "invested" in there, but I received some around my 10th birthday and they never struck a single prize. In 40 years.
Indeed, premium bonds are just a slightly more "entertaining" way of allocating interest. Just as arbitrary as the MPC, but potentially a much higher rate (probably not though).
I've always earned roughly the same from Premium Bonds as the equivalent savings, and it's tax free. Doesn't seem a terrible deal as long as you're filling your ISA up each year. Plus you have a frisson of excitement every month.
Yes if you choose annuity but you can also buy those with regular cash so it's as relevant here as price of tea.
Pensions are more tax efficient and offer a better option of investments (companies) than what is effectively fiat interest going into a lottery pool.
If you have cash in premium bonds you might die young then pay inheritance tax.
Better give your kids cash earlier to live off or invest to avoid this, and so they can over-stuff their pensions ;). Not many people think that far ahead (60 year horizon)
Some young adults in my life have grandparents who just hit this point, and are trying to set up gifting money to the grandkids in the form of brokerage accounts.
The first line of the Wikipedia article on pensions is more accurate than wherever you’ve pulled that from:
> A pension (/ˈpɛnʃən/; from Latin pensiō 'payment') is a fund into which amounts are paid regularly during an individual's working career, and from which periodic payments are made to support the person's retirement from work.
A pension is a financial instrument. There’s no need to purchase an annuity, which means a pension organised correctly can be passed on to your children or spouse, and there’s no lottery or gamble angle.
The wikipedia definition is strange. A pension is not a fund. A pension fund is a fund! (There is also a wikipedia page for that!)
Apart from that how is “regular income paid by to someone who no longer works“ different from “periodic payments made to support the person's retirement from work” anyway?
Because you missed the original distinction, which is that an annuity — a product purchased using your pension savings where all the value is lost when you die — is not the same as other pensions, where for example you have stocks and shares paying dividends, in a pension wrapper, and those pass on to your estate when you die.
The word pension is overloaded. A SIPP is a pension, the state pension is a pension, and people refer to their annuity as pensions too.
> A pension is not a fund. A pension fund is a fund!
The word fund is being used in two different ways here. A pension is a fund, but is not a Pension Fund.
The wikipedia page you mention says that "The common use of the term pension is to describe the payments a person receives upon retirement, usually under predetermined legal or contractual terms."
I'm familiar with retirement accounts and pension plans in a number of countries but not in the UK. I see that in the UK "pension" is often used a short-hand for "pension scheme" (it seems a relatively new development which I've not seen reflected in dictionaries).
For what it's worth, the wikipedia page for Personal_pension is redirected to Personal_pension_scheme: "A personal pension scheme (PPS), sometimes called a personal pension plan (PPP), is ..."
What is about HN where numerous posters do not believe that investing in the US or EU stock markets is better than completely random outcome, like roulette red/black? Man, this place is weird sometimes. What the fuck are you investing in for retirement if not stocks? Sea shells!!?? I hereby quote Brandolini's law:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
> What is about HN where numerous posters do not believe that investing in the US or EU stock markets is better than completely random outcome, like roulette red/black?
Err, you could start by not making wild inferences and replying to assertions that weren't made.
A single investment is basically gambling. Where it moves is largely impossible to predict or (for a nobody like me, who wouldn't have the means to engage in market manipulation) control. You can reduce the randomness/risk by spreading out your investment across multiple stocks. That's just the central limit theorem. For the market as a whole, on a long enough timescale, the historical aggregate trends upwards, but is still effectively random.
> What the fuck are you investing in for retirement if not stocks?
I can be critical of something and still acknowledge the reality that I am effectively forced to engage with it. I generally invest in a few index funds to reduce the variance and mental overhead, but it's still there.
---
In one way it's much worse than "mainstream" gambling: its value depends on society holding the shared delusion that stocks (both in general and yours in particular) are actually worth something. That leads some people to become incredibly invested in maintaining that delusion, since they know what's at stake for them. This thread could be considered an example of where that mentality leads.
And as you said yourself:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
I don't disagree, but stock trading ads are in some ways already more strictly regulated than gambling ads here. Gambling ads are required to have a vague "please gamble responsibly" statement, but ads for CFD trading platforms are required to have a prominent warning stating the exact percentage of their accounts which lose money (often >75%). The gambling ads don't have to tell you the real odds of coming out ahead.
I think a fair and reasonable advertisement policy is to ban all advertisements during "children's programming hours", or 0800 to 1600 when school is not in session. During "Prime Time" hours of 0500-0800 and 1600-2300, adverts should be limited to luxury goods (e.g., fashion), government PSAs, and non-addictive goods or services (NO drugs, NO tobacco, NO gambling, and NO stock trading, to name but a few). Between 2300 and 0400, allow "free reign" on subscription channels but still bar "vice" or addiction ads.
We've got a century of data showing laissez-faire approaches to advertising results in maximum harm to a society, and ample recent data from the internet age showing how dark patterns in psychology are exploited by advertisers to drive outcomes.
We have to do better, and the UK's step is at least an attempt to stem the harm. I can't fault entities from at least trying to do better.
Choosing streaming services will be correlated to income. Netflix (medium $) and Disney+ (high $$). The less wealthy are watching YouTube with ads included.
Children are the people least able to destroy their own lives through spending, so that feels pretty backwards. I think it's generally accepted that people who grow up around e.g. alcohol tend to have a healthier relationship with it than people who are suddenly exposed to it as an adult.
> The punter does not win on average with stocks due to fees and spread.
Literally 100% of my investing is the stock market. I have so much faith in the stock market that I rent because I don't want to waste the opportunity cost on equity in property.
A punter is informal slang for a person who gambles. I buy and hold a diversified portfolio of index funds over decades. I am very much not a punter.
It seems there is more than one definition of 'punter'. I meant it as 'customer/client'. But other sources define it as 'a person who gambles, places a bet, or makes a risky investment'.
Not really. There just seems to be more than one meaning, and we were each aware of different ones. The meaning might vary by country (I am in the UK).
That 0.6% one is actively managed. The true index funds on that list are charging 0.2% or less (0.12% for most of the ones you'd want). So 0.27%-0.35% all-in. I stand by 1% being be a rip-off.
Putting your money into an index fund is the exact opposite of what is being advertised, e.g. trading platforms optimized for day trading, complete with blinkenlighten and "learn to trade" mini courses teaching technical indicators and other voodoo nonsense.
i was going to comment on this. gambling ads of all kinds, sky-bet, sky vegas casino + whatever in their hydra form. in depressed places like luton - you see how gambling has destroyed the little that remained.
ban gambling companies from sponsoring sports teams, from being associated with sports teams etc.
It is very noticeable that the gambling shops are clustered around the poorest parts of every town.
I grew up near a gambling shop. You would see the punters desparately trying to eek out every last puff on their roll-up cigarettes, while the gambling shop owner would drive up in his Rolls Royce.
I'm not in the UK, but yeah it's nothing short of fucking disgusting how plastered TV is with these incessant gambling ads. "Gamble on slots on your phone while you're in the metro, the hairdresser, the dentist!" they shout, at kids and adults alike, 2 times every minute on every commercial break. Disgusting.
