I’ve never understood the phenomenon of online gambling. It’s a very aggressively marketed industry, as evidenced by the hours I spent cleaning up the Gambling category at ODP several years ago. There was a woman who had the name of a popular online casino tattooed on her forehead (for a surprisingly low $10,000), and you can barely search for information about card games without falling all over online poker sites.

But is online gambling safe? I’m not talking about from a technical standpoint - there are sites like Mac Poker Rooms that help analyze whether a site is trustworthy (though I suspect they also tuck referral codes in there) - but rather from a health standpoint. A couple of months ago, the U.S. Congress voted to make online gambling completely illegal - specifically, credit card companies now cannot collect payments for bets. The Congress presumably did this because gambling of any kind can be addictive, and especially online gambling where you don’t even have to find a casino - you can do it in your jammies and slippers. So I’m not sure that online gambling is really a good idea - I think those who are addiction-prone stand to lose a lot by getting into this. But then again, surely we have the right to do what we want with our money, as long as we pay taxes - right? So why is the government getting involved in the first place?