dinghy wrote: ↑Sun Apr 14, 2024 7:54 am
OTABILL wrote: ↑Sat Apr 13, 2024 11:44 pm
I speculated on the reason the number of B&M casinos have increased in AZ.
Sorry, misunderstood your point. But legalized online casinos are growing the market. So you would still have the B&Ms, possibly with their revenue somewhat intact. But then the online revenue would add vastly to that.
This is New Jersey, compiled by UNLV:
https://gaming.library.unlv.edu/reports/ac_hist.pdf
In four years, overall revenue grew 65%.
ok different focus for a moment here; and I'm going to say up front I'm about to say something non-supportive and critical. This four year growth in revenue you highlighted could be fueled by the money the federal government, and some states, handed to people during the first year+ of the pandemic. the typical casino customer demographic: a majority of customers/players are not wealthy or even upper middle class with lots of discretionary disposable wealth, they are middle or lower class or even poor, the type of person, economically speaking, who should limit gaming or not play at all. Taking welfare or social security funds meant to allow people to survive, and giving the vast majority of it to casinos, is not a good postitive thing.
Referring to gaming & gambling as a 'industry' or even 'market' is questionable.,,,entertainment business is probably the best word I can think of instead to refer to casino gambling, since that's what I regard it as, entertainment. The benefits that people sight for having a lot of casinos, such as the taxes they yield and jobs they provide, really do not offset the economic damage they ca potentially do in the long run to local communities and the economy at large, because they really truly end up concentrating wealth & money in the hands of a few.
There is a "right" size for the casino business and gaming in general and I believe we exceeded it a long time ago; but this recent, current growth that is largely fueled by
online gaming is not good at all for the bigger picture, surely you can see that. People blowing money playing games online from home in their pajamas does not benefit the economy and society very much if at all, there is little if any employment growth from this, and much of this is fueled by credit cards, which is a huge problem right now and has been for a very long time. It's an unsustainable situation.
I have no idea how to fix it since the solutions really boil down to personal choice and freedom, how do you convince people to act in their own long term benefit if they can't see it themselves? How do you protect people from themselves? How do you combat selfish shortsighted tendencies in the human heart? I don't know.
And I don't think any of that applies to anyone here on this forum, you all (even Mr. Dinghy, and Faa whose posts I often do not understand but seems to be a happy go lucky guy who probably is a lot of fun in real life) seem to be intelligent and thoughtful people, evidenced by the posts here and the things most of you say. I now expect to be clobbered in response to this opinion, but that's ok, I am kinda asking for it now!