It depends on your ideology and stance. I think a good portion of most societies could use the culling that'll go along with it. Because no matter how you cut the pie, people are still people and just because you believe people are intrinsically good doesn't make it so. I think we should all be under surveillance 24/7/365, but then again I've been raped, beaten, tortured, home invaded and worse so I actually care about the important things like victims being able to put pieces of shit in prison.
So, I hardcore game and hardcore "gamble". But I only play poker, and I'm in the net positive for all gambling, and for poker. I made a living, if a crappy one while I was in Vegas.
My father's a compulsive gambler. I've managed to narrow it to poker and I do well. He has "formulas" and superstitions about slot machines. Wandering around casinos, I'd think "sucker" every time I saw someone playing one.
I sat down at a slot machine while waiting for a restaurant to open. I put in $60 for shits and giggles. $200 later I got up, confused. I looked at the machine's text, seeing who made it. Guess who? A favorite gaming company from my childhood - Konami.
I played slots once more while hanging out with friends after a cheap lunch, and again while wandering Freemont waiting for my AirBnB to open up one morning.
I played a digital Keno machine, winningly, and later for drinks equalling more than I put in.
I can avoid the slots, electronic games and table games. They're well designed, rigged in the house's favor and overall a waste of time.
I lost maybe $600 overall to slots. I won maybe $200 overall from keno. In Texas, I won over $15,000 in lottery tickets. In Vegas, far more than that in poker. I count myself lucky and disciplined. It's insidious the way that dopaminergic tricks and complicated systems (bonuses, etc) manage to keep people and hook them. I've seen the dejected, humiliated looks at table games, electronic games and the poker tables.
I've watched assholes use exploitative play at the poker tables to take social security checks from seniors and mentally handicapped people. Slots, electronic games, and table games do far worse than that. Loot boxes and TCG "packs" are the same shit. At least at poker it's human versus human.
$0. I had everything stolen by my ex-gf and her friends. It was all liquid, in the form of gemstones and collectibles in Las Vegas. The cops there are useless. I'd just clawed my way out of poverty over the course of three years and was about to sell everything, fund a 529 for my five year old daughter and start a small business. I'd managed to buy and resell until I had a little over $100,000 in merchandise to sell. I had everything put away and secured in containers and didn't check on it for months while working when she wasn't due to health issues. Our dumbass neighbor got her hooked on fentanyl and that was it. Everything gone.
You mean "the US considers it legal within the US". It's not legal. It's like the shit you see on Reddit about China and Russia spying, with the US playing the victim as if they weren't spying too, and better, before that. The same goes with corporate espionage and tech transfers. Hyptocrites. People were thrown in mental hospitals back in the day when they theorized about Echelon, Carnivore -- what we know developed into PRISM run by the 5 Eyes. These people should be ashamed and liable for all the problems they've caused at home and abroad. National Security Interests is an excuse. And a flimsy one. And one day, when the US isn't The Superpower anymore, they're going to pay for this shit if they continue this colonialistic, imperialistic bullshit.
What's more, an effect of access to information and training that wasn't available before. Like the above poster, referencing information sources and training materials is possible with a few clicks and some typing, copyrighted or not. Which is epic.
Who had this level of ability before? The wealthy. I've got some projects in mind that'll enable some interesting training. But while we wait, we've got Appropriate Technology and CD3WD to shore up humanity's advancements in subsistence and basic technology all the way on up to YouTube videos, articles and books on digital financial markets and video game design. There hasn't been an age where the common man can go from zero skill to an initial level of mastery in a day, on almost any topic. I like to take the example of driving stick shift, learning with a YouTube video. The sad part of a lack of reading is in the areas of encyclopedias.
WikiPedia is interesting, but more focused than being able to pick up a book, read the next entry. In some ways digital resources and reading are more dead-ended without the dedication and motivation on the part of the reader.
I read Brittanica as a kid, out of interest and to finish homework, as well as any thesaurus and dictionaries that were around. What's contextual now? Donation campaigns and ads. Or videos to take you back to the "popular" stuff related to what you were viewing earlier.
Ingame VOIP to "social group" Discords. It used to be largely TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. If they're not talking Discord populations then they're definitely out of touch. If they're not talking ingame VOIP they're dinosaurs.
Especially in communities. For ease, people lump things such as social media and gaming in with "addiction". I'm sure 100 years from now in many cases the "social media addicts" will have a subset that leans toward success beyond their local community, and the gamers have a longer life expectancy than many in their community. I'd rather my kid game than go outside even in our middle-class neighborhood. I'd rather have my kid keep in touch with friends via social media than having them all in my kitchen when I'm not home.
There're tradeoffs, pros and cons to social media and gaming, but framing it in an addiction narrative isn't helping matters. This is what led many Chinese people to put their kids in "camps" that used Electro Convulsive Therapy to "fix their internet addiction". This is born of ignorance, and the addiction narrative.
I think elements can be intuited, and more studies done, but when you're bashing the cheapest forms of entertainment and social contact, and safest to boot, as addictions... that's just ignorant.
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." is bullshit. Some things need long-form. That said, I'll see what I can do about it, and update here if I can manage it.
Work is work. If young, or have a parachute, go for it. If, like me, needing a leg up, go for it too. Slave work that enables you to network and learn is valuable. Alternatives -- status quo engineering, or if in my boat -- shit jobs because I don't have a degree, certs or recent experience. When starting a business (I've helped start several), find a model that others use, and copy it. Go for broke, and take risks once you have the ability to. I've met far too many people unwilling to fund their business, goal or dream by copying models and learning by the example of others. Figuring others' models out is a skillset in and of itself.
At this point if you ignore all the evidence that these people have anxiety, or were in otherwise shitty environments and states in the first place, whether genetic nature or nurture you might want to just say we're collating and correlating rather than finding causes. Conscious decision my ass.
I've smoked heavily since 12 years old. I function, and it's helped me with arthritis and PTSD at this point. Sometimes addressing problems with common drugs helps. It definitely changes amygdala response and cerebral blood flow patterns. I think it in general makes people question things, and be better people. I also know it affects motivation, which can be great to quell response to pain, but is detrimental to getting up and out.
Much of it is also habits, related or not. If you aren't taking vitamins, exercising, eating well and isolated from people and things that are detrimental you're obviously not going to have things go smoothly. My family are monsters.
It's helped me through it. Or if you're handicapped by mental issues or the like.
I don't buy the psychosis thing, except maybe from edibles. And I absolutely hate to see people stating that it "makes them creative" or other repeated things that they've read or heard somewhere. Oversimplification and lack of education about it is common. Some people just don't handle it well, or are nudged into craziness. Too many people I know didn't read up on what they were getting into with cannabis and psychedelics and want to be into it to be cool, or fit in. I used to smoke to get high. Now I smoke for pain relief.
So, because you get paid to develop malware traps, we're supposed to like the kiddie pool that can literally get you arrested for next to nothing (freedom of speech), with script kiddies and ideologues dominating the media platforms that idiots _shouldn't_ be able to use in the first place. That's one reason for societies ills -- we've stamped out natural selection.