From ESPN:
FanDuel spokesperson Justine Sacco told ESPN.com on Tuesday that the company’s internal data showed that DraftKings employees won 0.3 percent of the money the company has awarded in its history.
I remember there being concern that Sacco’s life was permanently ruined due to her ill-fated Tweet. Assuming this is the same Justine Sacco (and I can’t confirm that it is but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…), it seems she has rebounded nicely. Which is probably what we ought to want. My position at the time was that Sacco likely deserved to be fired — or at least disciplined — not because she was an Awful Evil Racist Monster (TM) but because she proved to be pretty bad at her job. If you are charged with maintaining a social media presence that is favorable for your employer, Tweeting out a joke that can so easily be perceived as insensitive and racist would reasonably call into question her ability to do that. I hope her employment at FanDuel means she has learned from the episode and positioned herself for a successful career. That would seem to be the ideal outcome: she received sufficient consequence to necessitate positive change while receiving an opportunity to recover.
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But it’s something, and perhaps will lead to a future company worth working for.
(Mostly, this is just me being a moralistic sourpuss.)
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* I’m fairly confident in calling fantasy sports a form of gambling. For me, the issue is not that fantasy sports played for money are legal but that sports gambling is not.
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‘s objections seem fair. I also skimmed an article whose headline indicates it is impossible for anyone but a very small elite to truly make much money regularly playing DFS. I got the impression trying to do as much is akin to an individual making day trades over the phone trying to compete with automated stock robots. Yea, you might get lucky and it will almost surely be thrilling, but in the end, you will almost assuredly lose.
But I’m not sure what the sites themselves can do about it. If the game is being tipped in favor of private parties who are simply better/more committed to the game, how do you stop that? It’d be silly to ask them to include in their (infinite) advertisements, “By the way, you are almost surely going to lose money to some guy who stares at spread sheets 18 hours a day.” And given that the pricing/prize rules are laid out pretty explicitly, it is pretty obvious that there is a house edge and that the expected return is negative.
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The DK/FD DFS model, though, seems chemically designed for Bad Things, though. It’s opaque for starters. The advertising is itself troublesome. The advertising plus the basic model is begging to make gamblers and gambling addicts out of people who are not presently so.
With general fantasy sports, even for money, you have the thrill and ups and downs of the season but it relies on a delayed gratification (you don’t know if you’ve won or not for months!) that relieves my worries.
I guess it’s sort of like slot machines and how they replaced the lever with the button to throw more and more feedback in your direction to get you to keep hitting that button and tossing coins in and hitting that button and tossing coins in… it’s as much about getting a fix as it is about even gambling. The casinos know what they’re doing, and while I wouldn’t make it illegal I consider it immoral.
This just stinks from the bottom up.
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I am not surprised that a company with as skeevy as ads as Draft Kings is also skeevy.
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Granted, this may not be the top-of-the-profession sort of client to get in the world of PR, but it isn’t nothing, either, and I suspect that PR, like a lot of jobs, is fairly transitory and one steps from one employer to another with frequency in that career track. So she took a setback, but the big news is that redemption is possible.
I might add: that’s a really canny spot and callback, Kazzy.
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It did not help that I watch “The League” and there is a running joke about something called The Sacko.
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Additionally, there was a meta-criticism of a twitter and/or SJW culture that so quickly condemned her for her tweet, but was happily unconcerned (and often retweeting) others’ tweets that she should be raped and killed.
Finally, it should be noted that she not only spent over a year unemployed, she ended up needing to be treated for PTSD and depression. And she still gets death threats on a weekly basis. (Or at least she did up through this past spring.)
I’m not sure that pointing out that she was able to find a job a couple of years down the road counters much of that criticism.
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