Preying upon the vulnerable to enable the rich

Posted

Photo/Flickr Photo/Flickr

The devil has a lot of diabolical schemes in his bag of tricks. If he can’t seduce you with apples, he will use pears. If he can’t get you to ruin your health by smoking cigarettes, he will get you to ruin it through gluttony. If he can’t get you to do things that are wrong, he will keep you from doing what is right.

His arsenal of weapons designed to undo and debilitate us is massive and we know his agenda is to steal, kill, and destroy. The devil has his minions and among them are the lords of gambling who are amazingly skilled at emulating Lucifer’s strategy of deception.

For example, if the gambling industry fails to push its desire to pollute our society with casinos, it will attempt to get the citizens to embrace the concept of pari-mutuel horse racing. If the representative government votes not to approve gambling on horse racing, then the gaming industry will attempt to find some other perverse plan to bilk the populace out of their paychecks.

There have been 13 gambling bills introduced during the 2015-2016 legislative session. Now, the Georgia General Assembly is confronted with a daily fantasy sports bill.

A game of chance

In daily fantasy sports, as with traditional fantasy sports games, players compete against others by building a team of professional athletes from a particular league or competition and earn points based on the actual statistical performance of the players in real-world competitions.

Daily fantasy sports are an accelerated variant of traditional fantasy sports that are conducted over short-term periods, such as a week or single day of competition, as opposed to those that are played across an entire season. The participants in these competitions pay an entry fee, but may win a share of a predetermined pot.

In the United States, the daily fantasy sports industry is dominated primarily by two competing services; and both services were established as venture capital-based startup companies, but are now billion dollar enterprises.

Daily fantasy sports have faced notable legal challenges in the U.S. over whether they constitute gambling, but in truth it is far more a game of chance than a game of skill. In fact, at least six states have outlawed or put severe restrictions on the industry: Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, Nevada, Texas, and Washington, because they consider it to be gambling.

The odds are stacked against the inexperienced players and in most cases they are mercilessly exploited. Information obtained by the New York attorney general’s office between 2013 and 2014 reveals that 89.3 percent of players had a negative return on their investments.

To compound the concern about daily fantasy sports BloombergBusiness reported on Feb. 19 that Vivid Entertainment, a company that has been selling sexual imagery for 31 years, will debut daily fantasy sports games.

... between 2013 and 2014 ... 89.3 percent of players had a negative return on their investments.

BloombergBusiness reported, “This is a natural extension for Vivid, said company co-founder and part-owner Bill Asher. In the early days of the Internet, pornography found a massive new market online – and attracted the interest of regulators. But Asher and others figured out how to navigate new regulations and keep their millions of users. Now he’s eager to apply those lessons to fantasy sports, which is facing its own regulatory shake-out, and turn Vivid’s customers into players in the process. ‘Fantasy sports and naked girls have a lot in common,’ he said. ‘They’re very popular with a certain segment.’

“For Vivid, offering daily fantasy sports is another way to make money off an already enormous audience. Asher declined to give traffic numbers, but they’re big. Market researcher IBISWorld estimates Vivid’s annual U.S. revenue to be around $100 million, giving it about 3.1 percent of a $3.3 billion market.

“For DraftDay, another fantasy sports site, teaming up with a company perhaps best known for celebrity sex tapes creates a competitive advantage: it only costs about $50 in marketing and advertising to draw a customer to a porn site, far less than it does to attract him to pure-play fantasy sports."

If you are an advocate for exploiting the poor, taking advantage of the vulnerable, welcoming a business that is interlocked with the pornography industry, padding the bank accounts of the fat cats of the gaming industry, and giving a place to the devil just do nothing and say nothing, but if you want to take a stand for righteousness call your state senator and say “”NO” to SB 352.

culture, economy, fantasy sports, gambling, horse racing, money, pornography