mrdressup wrote:refshateRaps wrote:Childs wrote:
Gambling was always there for kids. Growing up in my time, kids were gambling with Pogs, Crazy Bones, and Pokemon cards. Rampant as hell.
Yes it was...But the scarier part is now its being hyper seeded into the youths minds by not only video game tricks but ALL sports networks are in on it scam, along with the Government, as well as the bookies. They now have wayyyyyyy more mind control tools via social media to connect and way more tool to provide ease of access. The infiltration of promoting and seeding and providing greater access to gambling is absolutely absurd the last few years.
This ain't the same Bro.
The damage this will cause over the next few decades will be enormous and the bulk of carnage can all be buried within a controlled narrative and propaganda. All we will hear is stories about low hanging fruit like Porter and commercials telling people to 'set limits' so they can look clean in this insanity.
Gambling was always there for kids? It was practically non existent when I was growing up. We had no exposure to it. There weren't even provincial and State lotteries. About the only form of gambling that was widespread was weekly one night bingo games run by churches and fraternity groups. No one had stock trading accounts either. You were in a class apart if you had access to a stock broker, and stock markets hardly produced gains. No adult I knew followed that. We collected sports cards that were not seen as buying lottery tickets. More joy was achieved in completing sets with players we didn't even know. All I wanted was goalie cards. All my Wayne Gretzky rookie cards were traded away by my brother for a bunch of stickers he wanted to put on his lunch box. In time we started to see illegal punch boards appear in the back of convenience stores. Arcades weren't paying you off in anything but adrenaline, and you could get hooked on that. There weren't video games yet. We played outside, and winning hardly mattered because we never kept score most of the time until we simulated overtime when the games were nearing their end. When I was given my first pen knife I thought the world was my oyster for all the things I imagined I could carve with it. None of it was supposed to be a source of profit.
What I would say is that in a generation (my generation) we saw a complete transformation of the world in this regard. Gambling has been completely normalized. Governments run and sanction these things today. Everyone wants to be in bed with it to get their little bit of trickle down.
So, it's absolutely not the case that it has always been there. It wasn't everywhere in the mid 1970s. When we entered the greed is good era of the 1980s things changed. It is not before the 1980s that stock markets became a preoccupation of the middle class and a gambler's mentality slowly entered the fray. We needed cable TV to show us all that was a thing. We could not want what we did not know existed. When I went to University no young adult traded in equities yet. People still aspired to do things to get ahead. However it was the beginning of the era when yard sales started to appear. The treasure hunter/seekers mentality we have today exploded at this time. This is when I first heard rumblings that stuff I had played with as a kid had "collector" value. This is now synonymous with growing up now, and it is being exploited in young people by trying to sell them "collectible" whatever. People are mining virtual mountains for nuggets at a very young age. It's all exploitative of someone down the food chain. We clearly eat our young today. We couldn't care less that the barriers to entry to a normal life require huge credit bets to be made. I bought my first house with the proceeds of two summers of lawn mowing. 5K down is all I had to put up. 7 years of U set me back less than 4K. I made it to middle age without ever having to use personal credit. Actually, I still don't use it. I still only pay cash. I don't see progress all around me. I see plenty of social decline and a never ending supply of distraction and false aspiration.
It wasn't that long ago.
