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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Yep. Physical barriers to harmful behaviors are a pretty decent brake to keep them from proliferating throughout a society. Low agency people are more susceptible to those behaviors, but also probably less likely to go to the trouble of accessing them if its difficult enough.

In Florida, most gambling was relegated to Seminole Tribe casinos, so they necessarily couldn't proliferate beyond the boundaries of the reservations. Florida has a deal with them where they pay up a chunk of the revenue and the state bans gambling elsewhere in its territory. It in theory keeps gambling minimized in the rest of the state and makes it easier to supervise and regulate the places where it does occur.

Now, the Seminoles have worked to make it maximally enticing to come out to the Casinos, and maximally difficult to leave once you're there, but at least it required you to physically drive there, and at some point you'd have to go home. So in a sense it beat, and still beats having a mini-casino on every street corner, which is harder to regulate and will probably ruin more people.

Las Vegas does this on a much grander scale, of course.

Digitizing the casinos... man. Its the rough equivalent of hooking up a pipeline to everyone's house that could dispense heroin, meth, and/or crack cocaine on demand. If you don't have to venture into the seedier parts of town and risk getting mugged to get your fix, I'm sure more people will partake.