It seems pretty weird, I grant you, but is it any different from a state monopoly on liquor sales?
And now I'm banned.
Argh. I hate this issue. If there were an irreducible amount that people who can't afford it were going to lose gambling, then sure, there's no reason for it not to go to the state. But once the state gets a gambling monopoly, they advertise, which in context is evil.
And they have terrible odds, which is also evil: I read something once about oldfashioned numbers rackets, which had something like 1000-1 odds, and maybe a 900-1 payoff. That's a steady profit for the guy running the numbers, but it's also something that can function like a savings account with a negative interest rate for poor people -- if you play a dollar a week on the numbers, every three years or so you have a lump sum of 900 bucks, an amount you would have been unlikely to save by other means. State lotteries don't have odds anything like as good.
Stupid, stupid liquor-sales monopoly asshattery.
My main issue with taxing gambling is to make sure the state doesn't become dependent on the revenue to the point where they run 800 commercials an hour that feature a rodent who encourages people to gamble at really stupid expected returns. Also, when somebody models the income from the tax, they really should account for the fact that if one state seems to be making nice revenue, the other states will copy it and the first state will make less money.
How is this ethically different from a lottery, and is there a state organisation on earth that doesn't run one of those?
A lottery that you can play from your living room would be essentially the same, yes. I think that would basically be online slots.
I do in fact think losses should be capped in some way, but have not really thought it through.
I thought cigarette taxes were in fact one of the main reasons (together with the many campaigns) smoking has decreased so much in the past several decades.
Right -- the taxes have just made it too expensive for most people to smoke heavily.
And as long as we're analogizing with cigarettes.
7,8: Good to know.
Maybe if it were separated out on the screen, like "you're gambling with $2, and paying $.75 in state tax", so that it felt expensive to gamble.
I have gambled a fair amount and enjoy an occasional poker game, but the more you look into the gaming industry, including the state run lotteries, the more you look at the face of pure evil. Take money from suckers and give nothing in return, and the more desperate the sucker the better.
2 gets it absolutely right. People really do like to gamble, so regulation is a problem, but IMO state run lotteries are evil and there should be dramatically fewer casinos in the US. I find the ones used as revenue generators in poor cities -- Detroit for example -- particularly depressing.
5: State lotteries were relatively rare when I was growing up. I'm not very happy with the lottery as it is run in my current state. They send coupons by direct mail, put ads in the paper, and run TV ads with an anthropomorphic groundhog as a pitchman.
The state liquor monopoly doesn't bother me as much (can reduce wholesale costs); what drives me nuts is that the huge taxes they then levy on top. Sin taxes are stupid. Or, is it just that I like all the sinful things, and am bitter for having to pay them?
I will say that a state-run online poker game is way better than a state run lottery (both in terms of odds for the players and in terms of who is likely to be the sucker). If there was talk of swapping the former for the latter, I'd support it. But of course there won't be, because, among many other reasons, lotteries will generate vastly more revenue.
Lotteries do seem particularly sad. Are there concrete demographics that have been crunched of who plays the lottery?
IMO state run lotteries are evil and there should be dramatically fewer casinos in the US. I find the ones used as revenue generators in poor cities -- Detroit for example -- particularly depressing.
Do you mean lotteries or casinos used as revenue generators?
I have a much bigger problem with lotteries. Casinos would be fine as long as they were limited to high-rollers only. Transferring money from the visiting rich to the local economy - what's wrong with that?
OP: I can't imagine they're that big a deterrent
I disagree. I think the combination of total indoor smoking bans and high taxes on cigarettes has caused virtually everyone who smokes to smoke less than they would have 20 years ago. I will leave it to Shearer to find empirical evidence that is somehow completely orthogonal to this point.
12: State lotteries were relatively rare when I was growing up.
Not just relatively, I'd say they were extremely rare. Certainly here in the upper midwest the idea of having a state lottery in 1980 would have seemed, I think, pretty bizarre to most people. Then Reagan came in and destroyed the moral fiber of the entire country.
Gambling addiction's an interesting thing. In terms of ability to fuck up your life, I'd say it's right up there with heroin and methamphetamine, from what I have seen. Less immediately lethal, but that's almost more of a bug than a feature. I believe the U-4 form that you fill out for your security check as a stockbroker still asks whether you've ever been convicted of gambling -- clearly a holdover from more wholesome times.
I have a much bigger problem with lotteries. Casinos would be fine as long as they were limited to high-rollers only. Transferring money from the visiting rich to the local economy - what's wrong with that?
For some reason the easiest casinos to build seem to be the ones where high-rollers are virtually banned because there's nothing but slots.
I believe the U-4 form that you fill out for your security check as a stockbroker still asks whether you've ever been convicted of gambling -- clearly a holdover from more wholesome times.
Even in those times, stockbrokers were doing something other than gambling?
Casinos would be fine as long as they were limited to high-rollers only.
I hate that. I don't see why nobody has more than one table of $5 minimum blackjack.
Then Reagan came in and destroyed the moral fiber of the entire country.
I thought it was the casinos on the reservations. Once they knew they couldn't stop it from happening nearby, every state wanted a piece of it to tax.
I once cashed out a nickel slot machine. The lights went off* and everything.
* on.
I was impressed with the way gambling was run in Sweden, when I was there during college. There weren't any big casinos (that I knew of), but a lot of little mom-and-pop bars would have two or three slot machines, and a couple table games that had ridiculously low table limits. Like, a roulette wheel where the most you could bet was like $3. The table limits were small enough so that the bar hosted them as entertainment, and make a little bit of money, but they couldn't really make a huge profit off of them.
It seemed like a much nicer alternative than giant slot machine warehouses that a popping up all over the east coast.
If you don't know someone with the problem, it's hard to imagine how bad gambling addiction can be. I know two people who lost their homes because of gambling. One it was scratch offs, which have no intrinsic interest or entertainment value (unlike blackjack, horse-racing, or poker).
I used to think that scratchoff gamblers were people who a.) have no clue about how reality works and b.) because of their cluelessness, have no hope for the future, and c.) also for that reason really believ that it was possible to win at scratchoffs, which it really isn't. (You can win on scratchoffs if you consistently get a big payoff after a few tries, but the people I'm thinking of buy tickets in multiple lots of 40 or 60.)
Even the non-obsessive scratchoff buyers I see (I see a lot of them where I go out on Fridays) have an air of hopelessness about them.
I have trouble thinking of it as harmlessness. With certain kinds of libertarianism you really have to think "It's their choice and they'll get what they deserve" rather than "Who is to say that there's anything wrong with this?"
Of course, faced with objective hopelessness and objective poor coping skills, maybe gambling is better than just sitting and moping.
Regarding odds, I'm aware that this thought is probably totally innumerate, but peep this: Looking at the odds for various games, I note that the Powerball has a 1 in 175,000,000 chance of winning, although of course that is balanced by the fact that the jackpots are usually huge by the time someone wins. At the same time, MN's Gopher 5 game has a 1 in 1,500,000 chance of winning, with a minimum jackpot of $100,000 and larger jackpots that occasionally go above $1,000,000. So knowing that, given that the average frequent lottery player is a working-class or lower-middle class person who's just scraping by, and also recognizing that most of the people who win those gigantic jackpots wind up totally fucked because they haven't the first idea of how to manage that kind of money, or even who to go to for help, wouldn't it make more sense for the average lottery player to just bet on the better-odds/lower jackpot game, given that $500,000 or whatever could massively improve their life, and the odds are so much better?
I used to think that scratchoff gamblers were people who a.) have no clue about how reality works and b.) because of their cluelessness, have no hope for the future, and c.) also for that reason really believ that it was possible to win at scratchoffs, which it really isn't.
But now you know better?
given that the average frequent lottery player is a working-class or lower-middle class person who's just scraping by
Actually, according to the pdf of Texas data, this doesn't appear to be the case. Pretty even distribution of players throughout economic classes.
I keep hoping that if the states make enough money with the numbers racket that they will start offering drugs and prostitution as well.
2
And they have terrible odds, which is also evil: I read something once about oldfashioned numbers rackets, which had something like 1000-1 odds, and maybe a 900-1 payoff. ...
I believe this is wrong and that the payouts were more like 500-1.
"I used to think": but some people I see gambling are actually quite prosperous, and so the hopelessness they're feeling must be non-financial. People going for the high payoff tickets (6+figures) might be very ambitious people who missed the boat but still dream of the big money.
The despair is double-ended, too. States institute lotteries because they've given up on funding normal services (e.g. education) by normal means. Individuals do scratchoffs because they've given up on normal methods of achieving actually possible goals.
29: Wikipedia says 600-1. But, at least they didn't buy TV commercials.
The despair is double-ended, too. States institute lotteries because they've given up on funding normal services (e.g. education) by normal means. Individuals do scratchoffs because they've given up on normal methods of achieving actually possible goals.
This, exactly. I've been trying to say something along the lines of "lotteries are the evil clown twin of a strong public safety net."
27: Okay, "the average frequent lottery player who is really harming themselves by playing the lottery"
25
... wouldn't it make more sense for the average lottery player to just bet on the better-odds/lower jackpot game, given that $500,000 or whatever could massively improve their life, and the odds are so much better?
Not really in my opinion. The main payoff from playing the lottery is fantasizing about winning and you might as well fantasize about winning big. No reason to buy more than one ticket at a time though.
Lotteries are regressive taxes, send unhealthy messages to citizens about both their own financial activity and the role of the government and exert a corrupting influence on government by making revenue-raising a matter for marketing rather than democratic deliberation.
And I have now completed the transformation into my father. If anyone needs me, I'll be in my study wearing slippers dating to the Clinton Administration, eating cookies out of the box and reading something about the Thirty Years' War.
The damn Maryland Lottery has had their jingle stuck in my head since the mid-1980s. I want those neurons back.
The main payoff from playing the lottery is fantasizing about winning and you might as well fantasize about winning big. No reason to buy more than one ticket at a time though.
This is nonsense. Fantasies are exponential while ticket price is multiplicative. Of course you should buy several tickets.
Heebie's stats make it seem that the well-off and employed play more than the poor and unemployed. So whatever despair they feel isn't strictly financial.
The two guys I know who lost their houses in fact did have fairly good jobs in the $40,000-50,000 range.
24
I used to think that scratchoff gamblers were people who a.) have no clue about how reality works and b.) because of their cluelessness, have no hope for the future, and c.) also for that reason really believ that it was possible to win at scratchoffs, which it really isn't. (You can win on scratchoffs if you consistently get a big payoff after a few tries, but the people I'm thinking of buy tickets in multiple lots of 40 or 60.)
I think it has to do with psychology. IIRC experiments with pigeons have shown if you really want to get a pigeon pecking away at something random rewards are better than no rewards or constant rewards.
38
This is nonsense. Fantasies are exponential while ticket price is multiplicative. Of course you should buy several tickets.
Huh? I can fantasize about winning just as well with one ticket than with many.
40: And given that pigeons are the species most closely related to humans, the same principle must hold true for any aspect of human social behavior.
28: I just yesterday wrote to my state representative urging him to support the sale of marijuana through the state run liquor stores. There's a bill in committee in the VA state legislature that would fund a study of the feasibility and desirability of doing that. It would be a great way to make up some of the job losses from tobacco farming. The main downside is that government weed is likely to be crap.
The main payoff from playing the lottery is fantasizing about winning and you might as well fantasize about winning big.
Agree with this. At a guess 50%+ of people in work in Britain are in a lottery syndicate. It's a bonding thing: it costs pennies and you all fantasise about everybody walking out of the office together and leaving them helpless. Harmless fun, when morale is at rock bottom anyway.
Fantasies are exponential while ticket price is multiplicative.
What does that mean? It certainly doesn't seem intuitive.
41,45: No, no. They've done studies about the going rate of fantasies on the black market. I'm assuming domestic markets at 4% interest, and pow! done.
The thing about scratchoffs is that it's impossible to win big. If someone got every single big ticket in a roll they might pay out $20 and get back $2000. That's not really big money and it requires that you pick the correct 20 out of a few thousand tickets in a roll.
33 gets it right: lotteries are a social bad, but essentially an outgrowth of our unwillingness to make our tax system progressive in practice again rather than in theory. That's why, politically, I would prefer to go after the latter rather than the former.
I wonder if, though, (predicating the partial amelioration of public values) we could at least moderate the problem by monkeying with the system to make it more objectively attractive to self-interested gamblers to stay within their means. Something like "you only have access to the multi-million tickets if you sign up to verify your income and are limited to X% of it; plus you get free bonus tickets for compliance." Obviously this would reduce revenues, but it would be a partial improvement and somewhat less paternalistic by being voluntary. (Although I think paternalism is a uselessly loose concept too - really any government intervention can be painted as paternalism.)
I have a relative who's ruined himself with chronic gambling (market "methods" rather than self-termed gambling), but I really have no insight into his condition.
39: Sometimes you get the guy going broke for other reasons who gets to gambling to try to keep a business going.
The main downside is that government weed is likely to be crap.
When legal weed comes along togolosh will be repping for the superior illegal weed, the absinthe of weed.
48: Or you could just put a 25% tax on lottery ticket sales, because people hate paying taxes.
I have gambled a fair amount and enjoy an occasional poker game, but the more you look into the gaming industry, including the state run lotteries, the more you look at the face of pure evil.
My favourite aspect of this was the legal quirk in the UK whereby bets placed at betting shops were unenforceable contracts. Every so often one of the big bookmakers just refuses to pay out on a big bet. The law has changed, but it still gives them a fair bit of wiggle-room.
There weren't any big casinos (that I knew of), but a lot of little mom-and-pop bars would have two or three slot machines, and a couple table games that had ridiculously low table limits.
Sound like my idea of hell. All games against the house, and no poker. Seriously, though, this sounds a bit like Australia, where many pubs and other establishments have supplemented their income with "pokies", ie video slot machines. It's led to a huge increase in problem gambling.
51: Effectively, the tax on lottery tickets is already over 50% in most states. Nobody thinks of it that way because the whole point is to get money without saying the word "tax."
Without getting into quantifying fantasies, I think 38 is as easily grounded in random-reward reinforcement: just as monkeys will pull the lever until their arm falls off, we will get more pleasure-of-anticipation from multiple tickets than from one.
45
What does that mean? ...
It's the sort of pseudo mathematical gibberish that laymen sometimes spout. HG should be ashamed of herself.
See, I think I would get more pleasure from saying "I'm spending a couple of bucks a week on the reasonable fantasy that I will win $500K" than I would from saying "I'm spending a couple of bucks a week on the virtually impossible prospect of winning $100 million." But perhaps I am just perverse.
The decay of fun is a nonlinear function of time and proximity to a WalMart.
Every so often one of the big bookmakers just refuses to pay out on a big bet.
Those Guy Ritchie movies aren't very good, you know.
I really despise John Major for introducing the national lottery into the UK. To be honest I just have a strong quasi-moral/aesthetic (oh hai, Bill Haydon) dislike of gambling in general, which is almost certainly founded on snobbery.
Natilo is that rare creature, the half-rational gambler. Sort of like the guy smoking low-tar cigarettes.
A high proportion of the bars in MN and OR depend heavily on some kind of gambling. It seems to be mostly the lower-end bars.
Scratchoffs in MN and video poker in OR. I think.
Also, "I can get the same fantasy from one ticket as from many" is homo economicus reasoning, whereas lottery use is clearly irrational.
I've been considering the possibility that the official Texas statistics are bogus -- Texas, gambling industry. Also that some of the poor people who don't gamble used to be rich people who did.
63: In Nebraska, it was always Keno. Keno is, as near as I can tell, the stupidest game ever.
Or you could just put a 25% tax on lottery ticket sales, because people hate paying taxes.
This is genius.
I've only skimmed the thread, so this already have been covered, but it seems to me that a significant difference between this and other sin taxes is that states run lotteries and other gambling activities themselves, rather than just taxing and regulating the activity of others. States don't manufacture and market cigarettes. And taxing cigarettes actually helps discourage their use. Whereas running and promoting a lottery obviously doesn't discourage its use, even if the proceeds are treated like tax revenues. So the state's hands are a lot cleaner.
Shorter me: why not just legalize, regulate and tax private gambling, instead of having the states run the games themselves?
68.last: That's what is happening with casinos.
Yeah, that's why taxing tickets is weird (if it's a sin tax, why does the state manage it and get the monopoly profits from it?), but still strangely attractive. Of course, too expensive and private illegal competitors might rise again.
Right, I know. But why use any other model?
The thing about scratchoffs is that it's impossible to win big.
Well, not impossible.
Running a lottery is a lot more lucrative than taxing one. There's no real advantage to legalizing+taxing, except clean hands. And if gambling is not wrong, the state might as well cash in.
Shorter me: why not just legalize, regulate and tax private gambling, instead of having the states run the games themselves?
Because the quasi-monopoly is what enables the high margins / low payout ratios.
In practice, the operation of lotteries is mostly privatized already (with all the attendant temptation to corruption, alas).
Illinois has gone a step further and privatized the management of the lottery.
I'm finding it a little baffling that people are conflating poker with lotteries (or even with slots). Poker is obviously gambling, but it's a skill game and doesn't have guaranteeed losses. The state (or casino or whoever) gets a fixed percentage of the action, but it's possible to make money on poker (it's not possible for everybody playing to make money, but anyhow) in a way that it's obviously not with the lottery or slots or blackjack (unless you have a good counting system).
Which is not necessarily relevant to the question of whether it's a business states should be in, but still: the difference is important.
72: That's a different lottery. The ones I'm talking about have about a $500 maximum payoff, a few $200 and $100 payoffs, and a known number of payoffs per box.
The gambler's problem isn't ignorance. My addict friend knew the exact payout (62 1/2% or whatever) and he knew exactly how many winners there were in each box. There was some kind of magical thinking plus addicting to the thrill of seeing a big payoff. $500 all at once is a lot more money than $1 x 1000.
Im just skimming it and am bad with numbers, but don't Heebie's numbers from TX support the idea that lotteries are deeply regressive? Look at median dollars spent/month by education and income level.
Regardless, obsessive gambling isn't just a problem for the poor -- it's the relatively middle class guys who are the casinos' biggest marks (but it's hard to stay middle class for long when the addiction kicks in). Casino executives will tell you that there are very few "high rollers," at least over time; there are people making desperation plays with a lot of money, infrequent wealthy tourists, and people who are basically laundering money.
And if gambling is not wrong, the state might as well cash in.
But this isn't the approach we take with anything else. Is selling cars wrong? Why don't we have a state monopoly on car dealerships?
States are good at taxing and regulating things. (In theory.) They know how to do that. (In theory.) They don't necessarily know how to run businesses, and as 74 points out, they privatize a lot of the back end administration anyway.
Because the quasi-monopoly is what enables the high margins / low payout ratios.
Are you suggesting the low payout ratios are a good thing?
74: I seem to recall -- although this happened long before I ever lived there -- that the citizens of IL were persuaded to vote for a state-run lottery, because they were told *all* of the money would go to education. Of course basically none of it ever did. This was still fodder for campaign commercials and grievance etc. when I moved there in the 90s.
Anyway, I'm with flip's dad. Lotteries are a poor tax.
I've got a system for beating Keno by playing eight 10-spots that cover every single number on the Keno Board. Unfortunately, it takes a large up-front investment, so I never actually do it.
Casino executives will tell you that there are very few "high rollers," at least over time; there are people making desperation plays with a lot of money, infrequent wealthy tourists, and people who are basically laundering money.
Casino executives will note further that the last group consists primarily of themselves.
Shorter me: why not just legalize, regulate and tax private gambling, instead of having the states run the games themselves?
Yeah, there's something pretty pernicious about having the federal government pursue a legally dubious enforcement campaign against private online poker sites while state governments happily run their own ones.
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There will be at least ten more hours this semester where I will be seriously wishing I could liveblog on unfogged, in a giggling note-passing kind of way. But I think even saying more than that is too pseudonymity exploding. Dang it!
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I really despise John Major for introducing the national lottery into the UK.
Really, he only nationalised it. The only losers were the pools companies.
Poker is definitely a way better game than a state run lottery. Still, the variance plus the rake is enough to hurt most folks who play over time.
Are you suggesting the low payout ratios are a good thing?
From a quasi-taxation point of view, it is.
I think Keno preys on the idea that you can find patterns in things. There are so many different ways to bet, and different payout patterns, that it's harder to nail down the actual odds and easier to fool yourself into thinking you've found something.
85: oh, sure. But it's qualitatively different than the lotterly, which is all rake.
78: No reason to change the status quo in the direction you suggest, except philosophical reasons. But if people took philosophy seriously there'd be no lotteries.
The idea that The State is incapable of running a lottery is sort of a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that the government is incapable of running a business. Next you'll be claiming that only private business is capable of running pyramid scams and Nigerian letters.
Really, he only nationalised it. The only losers were the pools companies.
And the bookies. They were rather miffed that the National Lottery got huge state backing, a free hour long advert on the BBC, and the ability to advertise on TV and radio, while they were stuck with regulation that meant people weren't even allowed to see inside their shops for fear that they'd be corrupted by the glamorous sight of old men watching the racing.
The idea that The State is incapable of running a lottery is sort of a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that the government is incapable of running a business. Next you'll be claiming that only private business is capable of running pyramid scams and Nigerian letters.
Now there's an idea. Crowd out private scammers with public sector scams (and give the scammees their money back, of course).
91: With all due respect, you suck at raising money.
I wasn't really thinking about it as a tax alternative.
As I remember it, the other reason public & legal gambling rose so fast is that the Native tribes won the right to run them & the rest of the country immediately dropped their principled opposition and horned in on the cash.
My mother-in-law has claimed that her husband lost several tens of thousands of dollars at the nearby casino. We're not sure whether to believe this, mostly because it seems unlikely that they had any such money to begin with, nor do they have anything particularly valuable to hock.
I totally get why people have gambling addictions, btw. I've been in Vegas and won $2000 in 15 minutes. It's like magic! All of a sudden, the most solid, drudgery-associated thing in the world, money, becomes this kind of wonderful thing that showers you with riches based on a spin of a wheel or a turn of a card! Who wants to go back to 9-5 after that?
95: Could he be selling at a sperm bank on the side?
I found Vegas depressing and the allure of gambling exaggerated at best. James Bond makes it look far, far better than the reality.
Golf is like that. It's not that hard for a beginner to par a hole now and then. It makes you think that you can do it again, but no.
N.B. I hate being around "people" and "flashing lights" and "garish carpeting."
It's more sensible to bet on the mega-millions lotteries because a win there is a life-changing event, and the problem with the odds isn't as salient.
Consider the marginal utility of money. Yes, you may only win $100 million when a fair game would give you $200 million, but there really isn't that much difference between those two numbers, utility-wise.
I won't touch the lottery myself, on principle. The fact that I won't kick in with my co-workers on a mega-millions ticket makes me kind of a sanctimonious asshole, I think, but there it is.
it's possible to make money on poker
Because you're betting against other players instead of against the house.
Yes, you may only win $100 million when a fair game would give you $200 million, but there really isn't that much difference between those two numbers, utility-wise.
The issue, fairness wise, isn't the maximum prize, though, it's the expected return. The lottery operators can skew that return however they like (well, subject to regulation and law) - it could be toward fewer, higher value prizes, or more low value prizes.
101.last: That gets at what I think is one of the most effective sales mechanisms ever. "If you don't play, you can't win." In the case of office pools, you're supposed to imagine every asshole you hate becoming rich as a king and you stuck in the same cubicle. People are more willing to pay to avoid that kind of problem than to gamble qua gambling.
Happily, I lose instantly whenever I gamble.
I won't touch the lottery myself, on principle.
Me too. Gambling and heroin are too things I've just drawn bright do-not-cross lines.
The only time I played blackjack I broke the (small) bank. I figure that's likely to be the high point and have no urge to try again.
Of course, I'm sort of a quant, so gambling feels like work and doesn't pay very well.
106: If everybody only gets two, I'm going with cannibalism and selling insurance.
government weed is likely to be crap.
Government whores, on the other hand, are likely to be first rate. Who knows prostitution better than government officials?
The only time I played blackjack I broke the (small) bank. I figure that's likely to be the high point and have no urge to try again.
Not that I'm suggesting you should try again, but blackjack has just about the lowest house edge of any game played against the casino, an edge which for games with not too many decks, is easily beaten with card counting. Which is why casinos are so aggressive at rooting it out.
61.1: Well, really I'm the half-rational not-gambler. As I've said before, my sole experience of wagering on games of chance has been to kick in a buck now and then to the office lottery pool, just to be sociable. Also, last year I played a card game at a bar for $3 which seemed as though it was just an excuse to give $24 or so to the guy everyone felt sorry for (who has now died from his excessive drinking and related health problems).
My uncle is a gambling addict, of the species of men who make lots of cash all at once (e.g. commercial fishermen) and feel like they need to blow it all on a spree.
At least we don't have faro tables much anymore, those sound particularly pernicious.
From Wikipedia:
Faro is a small town in the central Yukon, Canada, formerly the home of the largest open pit lead-zinc mine in the world
I find that I can fantasize about coming into impossibly large sums of money even without buying a lottery ticket. Means of doing so is horribly improbable, but then so is winning powerball.
I voted against it when we had it on the ballot in the 80s, but the fact is that people want this kind of thing. It would pass again, as would the laws allowing poker machines etc. It's obviously a problem for some people, but what with internet gambling, and all, there's no longer really much ability to stop people from throwing their lives away.
Some of the Maryland commercials weren't bad.
A friend of mine knew a guy who had a long-lost uncle who died with a couple of million dollars stashed in coffee cans under his bed. Just a couple million though.
Yeah, but with some clever play in Vegas you could parlay that into real money.
Another from Maryland:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiZcwySjdbg
115: I could never do that. I buy coffee in bags.
unenforceable contracts
Back when I was an apprentice we successfully defended a client who was being sued over a bounced cheque on the basis that it had been written to pay his poker losses and was therefore unenforceable.
re: 106
Heh. As far as I can tell, gambling and opiates are two things I'm safe from as I have no inclination towards either. I've bought the odd lottery ticket in work syndicates, and a few tickets as an individual years ago, but have never really felt the lure of gambling. And whenever I've had opiates, I've not been bothered. Morphine, just last week [medically administered]. I'd rather have had a glass of wine.
A friend of mine knew a guy who had a long-lost uncle who died with a couple of million dollars stashed in coffee cans under his bed. Just a couple million though.
Did he use it to endow a Chair of Ancient Greek? (Oudemia would like that one.)
120 is cool.
I'd guess a nice flat on Byre's Road would go for more than the 100K it says there, though. Unless it small, or over a chippy or something.
If I had a ton of money to dump, a whole Department of Mongolian Empire Studies would be in the first ten million.
I've joked with my wife that if I become fantastically wealthy I'll endow a team of ruthless assassins, Old Man of the Mountain style.
"I stand here on this platform, and say, no more welfare for the workshy. No more unfettered immigration to our shores [pffft of blow-pipe. Impact of dart laced with deadly poison made from some rare Amazonian mollusc] ...."
"Government sources confirmed today that the death of the Home Secretary was being linked to the shadowy Ch'ib Y'a Ba-as."
I heard awhile ago that legalized gambling seems to run in 75 year cycles. A generation sees the problems with it (for example, my sister's suicide due to an addiction that allowed her to fall prey to legalized usury) and it gets outlawed. Then the victims and those who knew of them die off, and people begin to see it as a victimless activity, and it gets legalized and promoted again.
I think outlawing gambling, like outlawing alcohol, is fruitless, but I hate to see the state engaging in what is essentially usury to the detriment of some of its citizens.
Tax it, regulate, don't promote it.
111: Right, it's unlikely that I'll ever have a better time.
Emerson, I bought _The Secret History of the Mongol Queens_ thinking partly of you.
123: that sounds like sort of a management nightmare for your executor.
You'd just need to hire an executor with black ops experience.
I find that I can fantasize about coming into impossibly large sums of money even without buying a lottery ticket. Means of doing so is horribly improbable, but then so is winning powerball.
This is an interesting thought. What are your fantasies? (And are they things that, like purchasing a lottery ticket, are within your control?)
About the only thing I can think of is writing letters to random billionaires, asking for million-dollar handouts. Pretty outstandingly unlikely to be successful, I'll grant. But, for the price of a $0.44 cent stamp, are the odds better than 165,000,000 to 1? Maybe!
I didn't mean endow after my death. I meant more as a hobby while still alive; but very rich, and in my sekrit/remote modernist villa surrounding by beautiful musical instruments, and books.
I meant more as a hobby while still alive
They say that nobody on their death bed wishes they'd spent more time not murdering people.
But obviously after my death other people would take on the mask of Hassan i sabbah, the Dread Pirate Roberts, ttaM.
I don't like the casinos, and we're about to have them hero win . I do play the lottery from time to time when it's a big jackpot, but I spend very little.
Wasn't there an article about people who had figured out how to win certain games when spending thousands of dollars on the tickets?
Like many here I've never had any real interest in gambling. Or really in opiates. However, I am a bad person, or at least so the OP says. And I evade excise taxes.
An uncle of mine mortgaged his small business, plus took more debt on, all to feed his lottery ticket habit. Relations between him and my aunt have been extremely chilly ever since.
ttaM could bet Dr. Evil of Goodness, arranging for child abusers, animal abusers, and inauthentic bands to suffer agonizing deaths.
re: 135.last
No! Authenticist/punk-worshipping music critics would be for the chop, though.
I heard awhile ago that legalized gambling seems to run in 75 year cycles.
With "70" for "75", this is the thesis of I. Nelson Rose. See his essay "The Third Wave of Legal Gambling":
"Like a prophecy fulfilled, it looks like we are doomed to repeat our history, having failed to learn the lessons of the past. Twice before in American history, players could make legal bets in almost every state, but these waves of legal gambling came crashing down in scandal and ruin."
Rhode Island still doesn't have a lottery. I think that they're too afraid that the mafia will get involved.
The gambling is the least interesting thing about Las Vegas to me. I liked the entire city blocks in the style of some other completely random place all made of stucco, the plentiful liquor stores, the desert evenings, the strip clubs and dance clubs... Casinos themselves are just glaring lights, though, slot machines are repetitive, and I guess all the other games might be fun if you already knew them inside and out but learning to play them just to gamble wouldn't be worth it.
128
This is an interesting thought. What are your fantasies? (And are they things that, like purchasing a lottery ticket, are within your control?)
My personal answer: I could finally get off my ass and write that novel I've been thinking about for years and it could be wildly, obscenely successful.
Beyond that, there's general staples of fiction: I could inherit a ton from some distant relative (although the terms of the will would have to be very specific indeed to exclude all my other relatives) or find buried treasure on my parent's property. No, none of them are within my control in any meaningful sense. (Finishing the book is, but not having it be any good, let alone successful.) But then, while playing the lottery may be within my control, winning it obviously isn't.
That's why people are willing to shit in shoeboxes.
My personal answer? Crack AI and open the way for a post-human golden age. You know, nothing big.
142: Just fix the vent and I think you could probably shit like everybody else.
142, 145 -- whatever happened there? Did we get a final report on what the problem was?
No, we did not. Apparently, "It works now" is good enough for shitting.
128: Give lots of money to my church and other charities, buy a house on Beacon Hill and a summer place (assuming 100to get private ,000,000 lottery), pay off my student loans, pay for my parents to get private nursing home care. Go to grad school and not need to worry about working afterwards and not needing to live like a grad student.
Didn't we have this thread before and everyone was all like "oh, I'd give half my money to Oxfam and another third to support progressive candidates, and then buy myself a small but tasteful apartment in NY/SF/London and a super expensive bicycle and a fancy record player and lots of expensive cooking equipment to cook grains and lots those goddamn fancy beans"? Hmmm, maybe that only happened in my imagination.
I think I am the lone proponent of buying (a) a Bugatti Veyron; (b) an underground submarine base.
I would need and demand an expensive custom nuclear submarine to go in the underground base, of course.
And, I suppose, a staff of attractive female ninjas of all races to crew the nuclear-powered submarine.
I'd send urple the plumbing equivalent of Columbo on the condition that he report back here.
Halford's main role here is to serve as a convenient foil for the SWPLness of the rest of us.
re: 149
My plan involves supporting the progressive candidates by ensuring the sudden dramatic death of the non-progressive ones. And a modernist villa rather than submarine base. I'd settle for a vintage Jag or something, too.
I think the canonical answer for how to spend you lottery winnings is 'Vegas'.
I'd much rather have a luxury zeppelin than a submarine.
A zeppelin does sound cooler. That way you can have a grand piano, and someone beautiful but icy to lie atop it singing torch songs.
Plus, you could have a fire alarm that goes "Oh the humanity."
Zepplins are pretty sweet, but I want the ability to surface in front of coastal towns and surprise them; hard to do a sneak attack in a Zep, however fancy the interior. Also maybe fight a giant squid?
149.1 sounds pretty good but I suspect that my real life response would be even more boring -- make no major purchases or lifestyle changes for a least a year while I waited for the part of me that kept thinking, "there must be some mistake, this doesn't seem real" to stop twitching.
I think the William Gibson approved alternative to zeppelins or subs is to go with a luxury ekranoplan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlEt0bCeTy8
But fitted with leather chairs and a nice bar.
It's going to be hard getting in and out of your mountain fortress with that, ttaM. Unlike with a zeppelin.
Submarines are cramped and dank. The Zeppelin option is superior.
The ideal is to find a low shallow spot well away from anyone's territorial waters and build it up into an island where you can found your own country. This has been tried but failed due to a lack of funding for a navy. You need the navy first to avoid annexation by nearby countries, which is what happened to the previous attempt.
I would need and demand an expensive custom nuclear submarine to go in the underground base, of course.
Yeah, you wouldn't want one of those cheapo off-the-rack nuclear submarines.
re: 163
Yeah, there is that. Ekranoplan to sekrit coastal base, then vintage sports car/ornithopter/zeppelin to the mountain villa.
Hmm. 166 is plausible. There needs to be room for a gigantic pneumatic tube somewhere in one of the bases, however.
165: Don't buy the undercoating. That's just a scam.
||
Undergrad in the elevator: "omigod I'm so totally tired of school I'm like so ready to be done. Are you going into consulting?"
Undergrad 2: "ummmm I don't know if I'm like ready to sign my life away?"
Undergrad 1: "oh I don't think consulting's like that. Like, to me it sounds kind of fun, like, you learn everything there is to know about toothpaste or farming or whatever, and then you give a presentation! Fun!"
|>
There needs to be room for a gigantic pneumatic tube somewhere in one of the bases laydeez...
I should really just give up and go drinking.
171 to 169 and my growing sense that I should have tried harder to get into a good undergrad program.
171: I did that years ago. It has its upsides and downsides.
It's sad that I can already envisage the mountain villa/sinister eyrie.
I have to confess, the zeppelin is just a ruse. I'll be spending most of my time in a pocket dimension manufacturing an army of unstoppable but gentle and humane robots.
The Russian mobster on trial has a yacht with a private army, two heliports AND an escape submarine. Half a billion they say.
As the classic joke goes, I'd take up farming until the money ran out. This approximately *is* my plan, in fact, with gradschool in *ecosystem* soil science -- that would be the kind that's all about externalities and not so much profit maximization -- just to make sure the money does run out.
That way you can have a grand piano, and someone beautiful but icy to lie atop it singing torch songs.
Not to wax sexist, but a billionaire super-villain doesn't keep a mistress because his wife makes too little noise while he's trying to work/monologue/perfect the Ultra-Ray.
178: a sufficiently icy personality quenches the hottest torch.
Greta wanted to be a wheat farmer in North Dakota:
Garbo had an on-again, off-again romance and was even engaged to the mostly homosexual photographer Cecil Beaton. The closest she ever got to marriage was with John Gilbert, but she stood him up at the very last minute, as he, together with the wedding guests, waited for the bride to make her grand entrance into the church.
"She wants to buy whatever state that has no people in it and turn it into a wheat farm and raise wheat and children," John Gilbert later complained in an interview before he drank himself to death. "She keeps saying 'You're in love with Garbo the actress'. And I say 'You're damn right. I don't want to marry some dumb Swede and raise wheat and kids miles from civilization."
Wow, that was really sexist. The Ex already read me the Riot Act today for suggesting that Tom Brady put Bridget Moynihan on the waiver wire because Giselle represented an exceptional upgrade opportunity. I should probably read some feminist blogs to make up for it. Are there any not written by women who are already mad at me?
181: If you're making a list, maybe you should put having less contact with your Ex on it. Not to pry or anything.
I don't want to marry some dumb Swede and raise wheat and kids miles from civilization.
Don't mind me when there's John Garfield to kick around, ladies.
Zeppelin and submarine, obviously.
No, urple, it's not for effort on my part -- what really could I do, anyway? -- but random luck of being in the right time at the right moment to receive an undeserved gift of some kind.
182: You're babbling. You're not making any sense. You're hysterical.
what really could I do, anyway?
Buy a lottery ticket.
I don't want to insult anybody's fantasy life, but we have in Vladimir Putin a convenient example of the reality of a Machiavellian, sinister billionaire, procurer of assassins, keeper of exotic mistresses and dealer in and deployer of weapons exotic and conventional. Do you really want to be a balding Russian politician who can't keep his shirt on?
Striking up a conversation while helping a lost billionaire change his flat tire isn't as much out of pocket.
That is, I'd like to make my fortune through badinage. Don't tell me it isn't possible: our old friend O was somehow able to parlay his talent for same into . . . well, something.
Striking up a conversation while helping a lost billionaire change his flat tire isn't as much out of pocket.
The nails to strew across the roadway might cost you a couple bucks, if you don't already have some.
Can't billionaires afford run-flats?
It's just as easy to change a tire for a rich person as a poor person.
193: Rich people have heavier cars and are more likely to have locking hubs.
I'm not actually looking for practical advice, people.
194: On the other hand, a small child could probably hold up the carbon-fiber Tesla while you changed the tire if you took the batteries out first.
195: We're just saying, buy some caltrops.
Charley, my point was that buying lottery tickets gives people feelings of agency in ways that just idly dreaming about great fortune doesn't. "You can't win if you don't play."
You can't win if you don't spread caltrops
180: but with fantasy money you can farm in Santa Cruz or Marin or the Olympic Peninsula. Note that some of these farms stairstep from rocky cliffs to steep rocky shores, so you could tunnel from your submarine docking cavern to your zep mooring.
None of you fantasy billionaires wants an armored luxury train?
My fantasy wealth plan involves plundering farms and eliminating agriculture. For the good of humanity.
Urple, WHAT HAPPENED WITH YOUR PLUMBING.
Santa Cruz or Marin or the Olympic Peninsula
One of these things is not like the others. Fantasies about moving to Forks may be a sign that you just ought to give up already.
Fantasies about moving to Forks may be a sign that you just ought to give up already.
Sounds like someone hasn't read nearly enough Twilight.
procurer of assassins
You remember that spy guy and how he got killed with plutonium and everybody was all "Oooh, maybe Putin did it." My response was "Fucking of course Putin did it. The whole point of assassinating someone with plutonium is to let people know that Putin did it."
202: it's like you don't even read the fucking archives.
202: I am in the process of making plans to meet a young woman this weekend who (a) doesn't eat gluten (b) does employ the Pal/eo diet and (c) is into cross/fit.
207 -- I can't believe you didn't invest $150 in the name of science. So lame.
208 -- oh yeah. But your "plans" should involve talking to her, not just ogling her from afar and then grabbing.
202: it's like you don't even read the fucking archives.
You remember that spy guy and how he got killed with plutonium and everybody was all "Oooh, maybe Putin did it." My response was "Fucking of course Putin did it. The whole point of assassinating someone with plutonium is to let people know that Putin did it."
I require more proof. It's not called Putinium, after all.
Degree of difficulty, really: get the plutonium from Vlad's office, transport it to London, "deliver" it to the "customer" without the Teabags or the Americans stumbling over it or discussion thereof. Moving plutonium quietly, even in small amounts, can't be easy.
But your "plans" should involve talking to her, not just ogling her from afar and then grabbing.
That's good advice, because she could probably render me a bloody wreck.
204: Or, more to the point, someone who has been to Forks (although not in a long time, and I'm sure it's perfectly lovely now for the sort of person whose fantasies run to Mormon vampires).
[Notes that neb is not a master of the martial arts.]
My Batman-esque contingency plans to take each of you down in case you go rogue are coming along nicely. In unrelated news, does anyone have any severe allergies?
137, 138: Thanks. I probably have a unique perspective on things. I'm the oldest of four siblings. In 1983, when I was 27 and my youngest sister was 23, she drove drunk and killed herself.
As a result my youngest brother began becoming an alcoholic. Last Spring my eldest sister committed suicide, mostly out of despair from her struggles with gambling and loan sharks, aka payday loan shops. My brother's health is now failing, and I anticipate his death in the next year or two. My Mother passed in 2010, so it will be only my Father and me left.
Some of these issues are not academic for me.
If you're making a list, maybe you should put having less contact with your Ex on it. Not to pry or anything.
Maybe a hair shirt? Or stones in your shoes would be less painful?
I say it with love.
I judge my mental state by whether I purchase lottery tickets. When I buy them, I realize that I need to get out of a funk.
218: Tripp, that is unspeakably sad. I am sorry.
Emerson's plan of endowing scholarly endeavors sounds good to me. And it takes a ton of money to fund a professorship for 50 years.
I'd try to coordinate the long-awaited Arxiv equivalent for biomedical sciences. All you need is to pay some well-respected people to devote some of their time to that instead of to other things. And endow another journal, open-access, that does nothing but publish REVIEW articles and meta-analyses. There's all these robots out there claiming to collect and collate scientific data and make it searchable (e.g. ihop-net.org), but the number of people analyzing the wealth of data out there is too small a fraction of the number of people generating the data.
Rhode Island still doesn't have a lottery. I think that they're too afraid that the mafia will get involved.
The mafia have all the business they can handle now that Rhode Island outlawed prostitution.
It's sort of amazing when you sit down with a calculator and tally up exactly how much stuff $1,000,000,000 can buy. It's a lot.
OT: When a friend calls you and reports that his/her relative, whom you had thought to be in remission (after months of wretched chemo/radiation) from cancer of a particular organ system, has learned that the cancer has spread to his/her lymph nodes and has to go back on chemo ASAP, is that as bad and frightening as I believe it to be?
Turns out Litvinenko was killed by polonium, which is somewhat less exotic than plutonium. Still, I think my point applies.
To clarify, not a relative of mine, but of a friend close enough that this news is very shocking.
Death ought to be the one apologizing.
it will be only my Father and me left
I was in Alabama this past week for my paternal grandfather's funeral. My father, the oldest of three and the only son, died in 1987 at the age of 40. My one aunt has been divorced for ~20 years and the other was widowed about 5 years ago. So I'm just a couple of quite elderly great-uncles from being the oldest male left on that side of the family, and both of them are related by marriage rather than blood. My father was a classically trained vocalist, and they played a recording (from before I was born) of him singing a hymn during the service. It was quite lovely and touching, but also very eerie.
Anyhow, my grandfather was an 87-year-old WWII vet and a very quiet, dignified, and deeply religious man who had probably neither drank nor cursed at any point in his life. However, the rest of the extended family came in from all over the Deep South and, like any southern family worth its salt, you simply couldn't invent this cast of characters. Holy moly, but there's one darkly hilarious southern gothic novel just waiting to be written there.
oldest male left on that side of the family
That is, unless you get into the the fourth-cousin-thrice-removed game, but I don't even understand how that all works anyhow.
"fourth" means your common relative was five generations ago, if the person is the same generation as you. And "thrice removed" means that you are not in the same generation; your fourth-cousin is three generations away from the person in question. Or vice-versa, depending on who is older.
Happy to help.
Wait, I don't think 239 is right.
240: It accords with my understanding. What's the problem?
That is, I think it should be: "fourth" means that the common relative of that person and a cousin of their same generation in your direct lineage was four generations before them, and "thrice removed" means that you are three generations away from both the cousin and the direct relative.
"fourth" means that the common relative of that person and a cousin of their same generation in your direct lineage was four generations before them
Second cousins share a great-grandparent, which is three generations ago. That's why I said "five".
"thrice removed" means that you are three generations away from both the cousin and the direct relative.
I'm confused by this.
I think I agree, though. I just got confused on who the "direct relative" was.
I think you're both saying the same thing.
So: your and your first cousin share a grandparent or two. You and your second cousin share a great-grandparent. Your parent and your first cousin-once removed share a grandparent. A fourth cousin thrice removed would indicate that, for instance, your great-grandparent and the party in question share a great-great-great-great-grandparent. I think we're on the same page, maybe, just the description in 239 confused me?
It's all fun and games until we have to invoke the Salic law.
Also I might have an extra 'great' in 247.
Can it be any accident that civilizations which avoided the black plague just call everybody "cousin"?
A fourth cousin thrice removed would indicate that, for instance, your great-grandparent and the party in question share a great-great-great-great-grandparent.
Comity.
Actually I had a class once that watched a video of a guy explaining the complicated kin rules used to determine whether somebody got called cousin, aunt, uncle, niece or nephew in [ remote place that I forget ]. I think we watched it because he used unusual deictic gestures.
But there's one darkly hilarious southern gothic novel just waiting to be written there.
Talk to Alameida and Scott Eric Kaufman, please.
I would start a vineyard/winery somewhere beautiful in California. Whenever my vast wealth made me start to feel inauthentic I could go out into the vineyard and dig my hands into the soil, taste grapes, squint wisely into the sun, etc. My staff of Mexican pickers would do the hard labor, of course.
It seems to me that today's southern Gothic novelists could work in fantasy and LSD and punk to produce something entirely impossible. In the good sense.
252: Indeed, as you might expect, kinship terminology is both widely varied and often very complicated cross-culturally.
The weirdest system of kinship terms I know if is in Thai. If the uncle/aunt is older than your parent, you don't distinguish between maternal and paternal relation; if they're younger, you distinguish between maternal and paternal but not between female and male!
Fpr cousins we don't distinguish anything in English. "Cousin" the weak sister of kinship terminology, especially because we can't remember the "once removed / second cousin" distinction.
I call my cousins by marriage cousins in law.
255: that was pretty much Poppy Z. Brite's niche. Was never for me, but there were those who loved her books.
I think we watched it because he used unusual deictic gestures.
Once when talking to a linguist I gestured toward myself with one hand and then away from myself with the other, while continuing to point at myself with the first hand, which continued so pointing even after the other hand was done pointing.
I was then informed that that was unusual.
</fascinating story>
[Notes that neb may be neurologically unsound.]
</fascinating story>
You should tell it on your date.
Better, use that gesture during your date and report on the lady's reaction.
Off to the mess hall again. The Unfoiggetariat is a beast of regular habits.
I read a Poppy Z Brite book once, mostly because that's Kid A's name too, and was completely taken by surprised by the subject matter. And the extreme goriness. For some reason (possibly the Z???) I had the idea in my head that she was more like Zadie Smith. I know that makes no sense.
Also, my, um, step-mother-in-law's cousin lives in Tenerife and claims to make a living from gambling. He sets up bets mostly, on sites like Betfair, rather than betting on other people's odds. On stuff like reality tv shows - who's getting voted off BB etc. I don't suppose it's a hindrance that he and his two sibings inherited their mother's million pound house.
265.1: she used to show up at hacker cons, and was friends with a couple of my friends. One friend taught her how to say "you two fuck while I watch" in Thai.
I once watched one Chinese woman get mildly upset at another for bringing up (and discussing in English) who was more senior and who should be called "aunt" or "big sister" or something. I think they didn't like each other much in general. One of them is now gone.
I think they didn't like each other much in general. One of them is now gone.
Uh....
The relationship terms in my other main language (the one I mostly use to talk to and about one side of my family) are fairly simple. First cousins are "related/4" - once removed same /5, second cousins /5. No-one really bothers after /8.
There are words for niece and nephew but in my family's dialect "brother's daughter", "sister's son" and so on are used instead.
I don't understand "/4" or any other formulations in 269, 270.
268, 271: I don't know anything for certain, but I hate to pry.
"related/4" - once removed same /5, second cousins /5. No-one really bothers after /8.
Because it takes four people within nuclear families to get there?
me -> my parent -> their sibling -> their offspring
Once removed:
Me -> my parent -> their parent -> sibling -> offspring
Second cousins:
Me -> parent ->parent ->sibling -> offspring -> offspring
Nope, not it.
Second cousins should be /6 there.
Oh. Then yes!
OT: Has the Atrios guy always been such a whiny bitch? He makes liberalism terribly unappealing.
275: Are you talking about his current top-most post?
Just to put this a bit more briefly: people who have a bunch of capital don't have to work, people who don't have any do. Most rich people emulate 'working' in one way or another. They dress in suits, go to meetings, serve on the boards of organizations, etc. But they don't necessarily do any work, their money does it for them.
What's the objection? (No, I never read Atrios, but not because he's a whiny bitch.)
I think it was something earlier, specifically, but he certainly doesn't indulge anybody who dislikes monotony. He's just playing magnetic refrigerator poetry with dumb circa-2003 shibboleths like "Village," "Lord Saletan" and "horrible people." I assume there are people who enjoy that sort of thing.
278: Oh, he's definitely dull like that. But he's not wrong about much.
But he's not wrong about much.
Most consistently correct guy on the internet, over time, IMO. In part he maintains that by being so laconic, but still.
Very few of the people I read have any entertainment value. People were bitching about Greenwald awhile back, and Dean Baker is the same story over and over again. Bob Somerby was that way.
My opinion, for those who care, is that the reality of what's happening is hard to make entertaining, if that's your standard. Charles Pierce, maybe.
279: Yeah, pretty much agreed. He easily gets a bug up his butt, as it were; irritable, sarcastic guy. I mostly don't read him because he doesn't say a lot; that blog is all about the comment threads, from what I can tell.
I cannot stand Charles Pierce.
Because he is a NE sports fan, surely.
||
At board meeting. Having 'princess cake'.
Sigh.
||>
Well, in part, true, but mostly because of the overwriting.
He makes liberalism terribly unappealing.
If you have checked the election returns for the last several decades, I think it's been pretty well demonstrated that in the United States, liberalism has been conclusively demonstrated to be unappealing. I don't think you can blame that on Atrios.
That said, Atrios is great.
People were bitching about Greenwald awhile back
Mostly Flippanter, who is too cool for liberalism.
He easily gets a bug up his butt, as it were; irritable, sarcastic guy.
Atrios is too fucking mellow.
His comment threads are crap, though, last I saw.
He makes liberalism terribly unappealing.
Also! I guarantee that for every Atrios out there, there's a someone-or-other on the right who's equally trenchant, or, if you prefer, entrenched.
Sad to see that Steven Benen is leaving Washington Monthly, by the way.
I had a Charles Pierce / Charles Peirce confusion. Like, what do you have against one of the great geniuses of the nineteenth century, Halford?
285: Shaped like, homage to, or flavored with?
His comment threads are crap, though, last I saw.
Jesus. It never occurred to me to look into his comment threads. He's not the type of blogger that has useful contributors.
288: I can't be tied down to your welfare state or your deliberative process, daddy-o. All that coalition-building scratches my record, you dig?
290: This point may be impolitic, but is there a rich history of transformative, lasting political writing that also bored reasonable people to tears? (Let's leave Kant out of this.)
Anyway, I dearly hope that Flippanter wasn't disturbed in a gentlemanly fashion about Atrios's unapologetic attack on the top 1% of the 1%. Because that would be embarrassing for Flippanter.
A 1% that can't take a little ribbing from bloggers is barely worth disagreeing with, much less getting all shirty about.
Oh, sorry.
294.2: Um. The Blogosphere is different. I don't read Atrios because he's kind of boring, but that's alright; it's his gig and he can do what he wants.
No one tell Sifu about the William and Henry James edition Red Sox jerseys.
294.2: Oh, come now. That's the sort of thing Hitchens was going for (and likely won't get)*. Atrios is basically making laundry lists of governmental haps to be pissed or happy about and why.
*I think Katha Pollitt is right that Orwell's political writing is remembered because he also wrote a couple of famous novels.
How long IS your attention span, Plip? Atrios's typical post is about 20 words. His long one today is about a hundred. That's warp speed borifeication.
I can't say I know what 297 is talking about. This is about an election, no? It's about whether the Amerkan people want a 1% of 1%er as Pres. Right? I gather that Atrios is pressing home the point, and I can't say I blame him. It's certainly among the thoughts I had when hearing of Romney's tax returns.
303: Maybe I got refined sensibilities.
If only we had modern theorists who were page-turners like Karl Marx. Then we'd see some real transformation.
I had been doing some figuring today based on this first week and estimated my reading load for the semester at about 600 pages a week. Happily, it doesn't seem like things will continue at quite that pace for too long.
Still: hooray brevity!
Are we speaking here about the state of the union? How can you see Gifford and not cry? And then, how much bullshit is it to say that there are no more Americans fighting in Iraq?
Flippanter: objectively anti-flippant.
309: I'm going to watch our President, actually. I hear he's going to hammer away at the wealthy. In a moderate fashion, though, I'm sure.
So I have to avoid Twitter for the next few hours. Damn.
Let's talk about bikes. I got a new crankset for my bike, and some other stuff. It'll be great.
312: hella! When are you going to install it?
I'm watching hockey and women's tennis. My sports bar is comfortable with its masculinity.
Maybe this weekend. It's a lot of installing, though. But with weather like this, I really want to be out riding. (Although I have been working like a crazy person since 9 this morning, so I don't know when exactly I would get out riding.)
Why isn't women's tennis the national sport?
Yes, why don't we encourage women to learn to use blunt instruments? That's a plan that can't possibly go wrong.
When women decide to kill us all, weapons won't matter.
I see no reason to make things easier for them.
Trolls clinging to the undercarriage?
So the union address will both start and end with terror (watch out!!).
With other stuff in between.
Send me bills!
(That'd be nice.)
I also got a new stem for my bike, so the handlebars will be higher.
I like watching the Republicans sit around looking constipated.
I installed a crankset just this afternoon.
320: I think this might be the first union address I've actually watched from start to finish (assuming it ends soon) [for whatever reason (?) I could never stomach it in the past... not sure what changed for today], and I have to say, watching the constipated looks might be the best part.
Speaking of politics, anyone read the Obama memos piece from the current New Yorker? May deserve its own thread.
The best part is that Mitt Romney released his taxes today. Mitt, you're both so vain and this song is about you. I mean, this is just brutal. I'm impressed that Obama hasn't once looked at the camera and said, "I'm talking about you, Romney."
Actually, it's more like a valentine from the president to the governor: a whole SOTU just for Mitt. It's sweet, I think.
Well, in Mitt's defense (ahem), he did say he paid his taxes as the law demanded, and not one dollar more. So, that makes it fine, right?
I can't stand watching SOTUs any more, but from the text this one looks OK -- Obama is clearly repositioning a bit to the left in response to the public mood and the full-throated defense of the necessity of regulation is important in light of strong Republican attacks on the regulatory state. (Sad that I would be pleased with so little, but that's where we're at). The announcement of an expansion of investigation into past mortgage abuses instead of a sell-out settlement discharging liability is also good.
Absolutely fine, so long as he doesn't want to be elected to high office in a country in the thrall of populist rhetoric (if not sentiments, I fear). (Also, if the economy tanks again, Romney's still going to make a race of it, which will be sickening to watch.)
Is there a history of wealthy presidential candidates' responses (or not, I guess) to charges of plutocracy, being-out-of-touch (sounds better in German), etc.? It might be interesting to see how the attack/defense interaction has evolved.
If the election isn't sickening, it isn't a democracy.
341: You are supposed to mention ninjas being sent to disrupt your daughter's wedding.
I'm not voting for anybody who can't fight off a few ninjas.
As if Mitch Daniels could ever replace Bobby Jindal in my heart.
Wait, what? "Half of all persons under 30 didn't go to work today." Is he including, say, HokeyPokey and HawaiianPunch?
I'm over 30 and went to work, so don't blame me.
Fewer than 0.01% of people under 30 inches even have jobs.
"Ours should not be a nation of haves and have-nots. It should be a nation of haves and soon-to-haves."
I accidentally clicked on an American network, looking for a sitcom rerun and got that instead.
So, that's what all those people were doing on my lawn today. I was very confused.
346: Don't forgot the unborn. Moochers.
Nobody sees ninjas . . .
Batman does.
From the Lizza piece:
Lowry, who is the editor of the National Review, called Obama "the only presidential candidate from either party about whom there is a palpable excitement." Krauthammer, an intellectual and ornery voice on Fox News and in the pages of the Washington Post, had written that Obama would be "a president with the political intelligence of a Bill Clinton harnessed to the steely self-discipline of a Vladimir Putin," who would "bestride the political stage as largely as did Reagan." And Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard and a former aide to Dan Quayle, wrote, "I look forward to Obama's inauguration with a surprising degree of hope and good cheer." Over dinner, Obama searched for points of common ground. He noted that he and Kudlow agreed on a business-investment tax cut.
This dinner apparently forced the Republicans to move to the right.
It's like Mitch Daniels *didn't even listen* to the SotU.
I didn't go to work this morning when I was under 30, but then I did go after I was 30. See? Young people are slackers.
a nation of haves and soon-to-haves and self-deporting never-will-haves.
The piece linked in 334 is great. Best single thing I've seen on the administration. It does make me think, once again, that I was an idiot to work for Obama over Hilary in the primary. But it also gives him credit where credit is due.
I liked it that Obama emphasized saving the auto industry, the best thing he's done. Fuck you Larry Summers. Didn't hear the whole thing though.
We got rid of one rule from 40 years ago that could have forced some dairy farmers to spend $10,000 a year proving that they could contain a spill -- because milk was somehow classified as an oil.
That's why milk has been so expensive over the past 40 years, I guess. Suddenly I feel more confident about our country's future.
I was an idiot to work for Obama over Hilary
"Mark Penn."
"Ours should not be a nation of haves and have-nots. It should be a nation of haves and soon-to-haves."
Did Mitch Daniels say that? I confess I walked away after his introductory 3 minutes. (And why was he standing posed off to one angle, like he was presenting us with a head shot?)
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Someone just referred to the background music on a TV show as "Carmen Miranda". After I stopped laughing, I discovered that there are no Google results for "Carl Orff's Carmen Miranda", so I'm putting this here.
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365: your mitzvah of the day. Well done.
Yes, happy birthday, essear, many more. Cake?
365: Blume says "O BANANA! MY BANANA!"
Bitching about incremental regulatory costs always reminds me of the "Going to Starbucks will drive you into bankruptcy" school of personal financial advice.
Turns out Litvinenko was killed by polonium
I bet all he did was notarize a bill of sale.
You can lease a nuclear-powered attack submarine. I did not know this before.
I wonder how frequent the payments are.
Sometimes a single missile attack will get the job done.
Sometimes, but really six months of trying is needed before you need to worry.
What's wrong with being sexist? Sexy. Whatever.
Be quiet or I'll link to a photo of a halo being painted on a mural of Paterno.
I already had to listen to the Slate imbeciles indulge Sally Jenkins and he "Well, he did a lot for Penn State" rubbish today.
I wasn't watching the debate, except on Twitter. Did I get promised a new and better mortgage or it is only going to people who have mortgages on nicer houses.
They're taking your house and giving it to Mitt Romney's kids. They need the storage space.
Who doesn't need space? The garage is just packed and we didn't even store 2 years of canned wheat. I'd throw out a bunch of stuff, except for the whole killed in my sleep thing I mentioned briefly above.
No. French fries and for pints of Newcastle. I'm sleepy but I don't know why.
Are they still freedom fries anywhere? Man, that was asinine.
388: Just a Catholic with a full garage.
My Republican friend Tom Coburn is right:
Obama would be my friend too if I kicked him often enough.
Anybody want a dusty, but mint-condition, Nordic Trak?
They're taking your house and giving it to Mitt Romney's kids. They need the storage space.
Tell them they can use my roof instead. It's got hooks that make it ideally suited.
Anybody want a dusty, but mint-condition, Nordic Trak?
Archeaologists of the future will marvel at these ancient religious totems.
Archeaologists of the future will marvel at these ancient religious totems.
Antiques of the [post?-]industrial age. Where once the treadmill had been a shameful punishment associated with the 19th-century workhouse, it became, late 20th-century or so, a means of working out in one's own house, and therefore a badge of merit.
Pigs are made of magical space-age polymers and shit: "Cured salted pork crafted as a nasal tampon and packed within the nasal vaults successfully stopped nasal hemorrhage promptly, effectively, and without sequelae. [...] To our knowledge, this represents the first description of nasal packing with strips of cured pork for treatment of life-threatening hemorrhage in a patient with Glanzmann thrombasthenia."
397: Well, that's about it for humanity. Time to move off the grid and start growing a Unabomber beard.
Obama would be my friend too if I kicked him often enough.
What do you figure the over/under is on that?
312, 13, 15, 29, 32: I know those "Shit Xs Say" videos are deprecated, but: Shit Cyclists Say.
I also just got a new (well, used) crankset, except that it, still in a UPS box, was stolen out of my living room. So was my (broken, packed for shipping back to the repair center) laptop, two weeks ago. This is really not the best living situation I've ever had--though, to be fair, it's also not the worst.
The thing about state lotteries is that you can have a theory that would justify a state monopoly (it's addictive! externalities! &c.), and you can have a theory that would justify the sort of marketing and overall strategies that get used by state lotteries (it's just another kind of entertainment! nobody's forcing you to buy a ticket!), but you really can't believe both at once.
I also just got a new (well, used) crankset, except that it, still in a UPS box, was stolen out of my living room. So was my (broken, packed for shipping back to the repair center) laptop, two weeks ago. This is really not the best living situation I've ever had--though, to be fair, it's also not the worst.
Damn, that sucks. Sorry to hear it.
The thing about state lotteries is that you can have a theory that would justify a state monopoly (it's addictive! externalities! &c.), and you can have a theory that would justify the sort of marketing and overall strategies that get used by state lotteries (it's just another kind of entertainment! nobody's forcing you to buy a ticket!), but you really can't believe both at once.
Well, you can if you're the state, and primarily interested in maximizing revenues.
The article linked in 139 is quite striking. From the opening:
Looking just at revenue, Americans spent more money [this is net losses, not gross!] on gambling, $92.3 billion, than they did on all live events, concerts, plays, all movie theaters, all spectator sports, and all forms of recorded music -- combined.
403: Yeah, I just skimmed it, but the historical analysis looks interesting, and meshes well with the general impression I've gotten of the role of gambling in American culture going back a long way.
Well, sure, but nobody uses this as a general argument: the state needs more revenue, so let's turn X industry into a state-only monopoly. It only works for liquor and lotteries because there's supposed to be something bad about them--but that aspect doesn't seem to then affect how the state-run department goes about its business.
405: Yeah, I don't mean to suggest that there's anything principles about it, just that the existence of both potential arguments gives the state a hook for justifying its behavior in various contexts.
I'm a little confused by the analysis in 334's link. The Democratic party has moved to the left over the past 40 years? I guess you could make a case that getting rid of the last Dixiecrats took quite awhile and stretched further into that period than we like to think, but come on, there's no honest way to look at Congress in 1980 and today and say that Dems have moved significantly left.*
*With the exception that almost all of them are now in favor of just-slightly-less-than-equal rights for telegenic, middle and upper-class gay men. We might call it "The Savage Corollary."
Sorry, s/b "telegenic, middle and upper-class white gay men"
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Also, you want to see some scary, Orwellian shit?
http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/journalism-labeled-extremist-terrorism/5581/
Really, stuff like this is good, though. I am letting the hatred build up in me, more every day.
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THERE IS NO UNFOGGED, THERE IS ONLY ZUUL!
Turns out Litvinenko was killed by polonium
He went to stab him through the arras, but apparently in the Special Edition Polonium stabs first.
I found Yggles post on teaching incentives in research U's interesting. Curious if the HUMANS (and STEMS) here agree about the incentives for teaching.
Thanks A. I rather like how it rolls of the tongue, myself. I wrote it as a joke about experimenting with commutes, but now I've adopted it for good.
None of you fantasy billionaires wants an armored luxury train?
No, that's my Trotsky fantasy. My billionaire fantasy is similar to ttaM's but with more Gothick architecture and an estate the size of a small country devoted to breeding endangered species.
Can any of you USians explain to me wtf Romney is on about accusing Obama of acting unconstitutionally? Is it just a random smear?
None of you fantasy billionaires wants an armored luxury train?
The problem about an armoured luxury train is that you still have to fit in between all the other trains on the rails. No fantasy billionaire wants to spend twenty minutes being held outside Waterloo waiting for a platform to become available.
I bet nobody held up Trotsky's armoured train much. Or not twice, anyway.
I dunno, in Dr Zhivago the armoured train seemed to spend all its time sitting on a track in the middle of the countryside not going anywhere. A zeppelin could go wherever it wanted, pretty much. And the ride quality's better. Trains are very shoogly, even armoured ones.
But The Czech Legion did capture Bolshevik armored train No. 4, the Lenin.
It strikes me that you could make a very good armoured train board game, as long as you had a very long narrow board. Going from station to station, coaling up, picking up different sorts of carriage, fighting other trains...
420 would be excellent, but very complex - Kingmaker on a re-imagined Monopoly board, more or less.
415: Was it about the recess appointments?
Almost everything is unconstitutional to someone, ChrisY, especially to Republicans. It's not worth googling to figure out specifically what Romney said. He doesn't believe it, he's just pandering to some weird constituency.
I want a zeppelin with a glass-bottomed pool. and a mask, and a lot of killer weed. ever since I was a kid.
421: on googling Kingmaker, that sounds about right. Hmm.
425: The glass bottom pool is brilliant, but mask?
I find it amusing that the people who throw around "unconstitutional" tend to bitch about judicial review like it stole their mint-in-box Greedo.
You know what are overrated? Those Venetian Carnival masks. They just don't look as cool, grotesque or sophisticated as people who drag them out for Halloween seem to think.
Underrated: the classic domino.
Looking just at revenue, Americans spent more money [this is net losses, not gross!] on gambling, $92.3 billion,
I'm a bit suspicious of this number, not least because it seems to be entirely unsourced. That's a loss of nearly $400 for every single person (not just adults) in the country. Even leaving aside lottery tickets, it's around $100.
More difficult to carry off than Batman makes it look: the cowl.
Perhaps the most challenging thing about wearing cowl is knowing how to actually wear it without looking like your head is emerging from a vagina. Or like you're wearing sea anemone.
429: Underated? Not by a half.
stole their mint-in-box Greedo
Having spent hours yesterday with the younger boy sorting through the boxes of Star Wars stuff in the shed, respect.
Even leaving aside lottery tickets, it's around $100.
I had the same thought, but then I decided that if high rollers like Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan can lose literally million$/year in Vegas, that kind of activity probably skews the average.
430: I've been trying to work out the numbers. Even granted a lot of people losing $1000 a year (which is very moderate gambling) and a fair number of people losing $10,000, $100,000, or more, it's hard to get to 92 billion. The real problem gamblers go broke and leave the game, though there are plenty of people who sustain $10,000 /year indefinitely.
Some of the people who do pyramid scans and other big frauds gamble away their winnings. It's like their pure neutral conduits who are excited just by the simple passthrough of money.
Even granted a lot of people losing $1000 a year (which is very moderate gambling)
Depends how you define moderate gambling, I suppose. I'd consider myself a moderate gambler, in that I play poker regularly, and if I'm in a casino I'll play a bit of blackjack to pass the time between poker tournaments or while waiting for someone. But I don't think I've ever lost more than GBP 500 in a year. Then again, I've never bought a lottery ticket, so I suppose I'm an outlier on that front.
I guess my position is that people regularly losing $1,000 a year are either addicts or rich, and there are only so many of those to go around. Then again, I may just be out of touch with how common it is for "ordinary" people to blow a lot of money in a casino in the US. It's historically been pretty rare in the UK for a variety of reasons, and I've been working from the tentative assumption that the higher casino gambling in the US more or less evens out with the higher sports gambling in the UK. Maybe that's not true.
though there are plenty of people who sustain $10,000 /year indefinitely
That's really not more than you'd spend with a regular habit of going to Starbucks eight times a day or if you threw dollar coins at pigeons whenever you saw one.
437: I don't think going to Vegas or Atlantic City with $500 or $1,000* is uncommon in the middle classes here. What has changed is how close the casinos are.
*and the unspoken assumption of gambling until it is gone.
433: I thought it was the acrobatics that did it for you.
To lose $20 / week you'd gamble $50/week ($25 twice a week) and win $30/wk. (Or rather, gamble $200/month and win $120 / month, which if it comes in a nice exciting lump wipes out the memory of 200 1$ tickets).
Trust me that this is routine, moderate, non-problem gambling. Problem gamblers start out buying $20 stacks and quickly switch to $40 stacks.
Poker is barely even gambling, since the better player usually wins. Lottery is pure glucose with no other food value.
412 I found Yggles post on teaching incentives in research U's interesting. Curious if the HUMANS (and STEMS) here agree about the incentives for teaching.
Yggles says:
The STEM departments received large quantities of outside money to conduct research, and they used their pool of graduate students as laboratory labor. An increase in the number of undergraduate students the STEM departments had to teach was a drain on the supply of graduate students, since graduate students would need to be diverted from lab work to teaching assistant work.
The amount of outside funding for graduate students varies not only between departments, but within departments, which leads to some awkward politics. All the students in my subfield at my graduate school not supported by outside fellowships had to work as TAs almost every semester; I think the research group typically funded them as RAs for one or two semesters total. So rather than being a drain on the supply of graduate students as researchers, TAships paid the graduate students and allowed them to keep doing their research. In some departments, TAships are reserved for beginning students, with the result that some subfields can support very few students. People in those subfields are definitely going to wish that more teaching labor was available for their grad students.
Poker is barely even gambling, since the better player usually wins.
I wish the English courts agreed with you.
Math often seems to be stuck with the humanities because its dollar-value payoffs aren't so immediate, and perhaps because math that pays off is usually recruited into the fields where it pays off.
Ishould add that I don't really know, but that seems to be how people in the field talk and that's how the economics of the field seems to look. Nothing like biotech.
I knew a couple in college who tried to quit smoking by instead spending that money on scratchers. I don't remember it being all that successful. One would think that a replacement to an addiction that brings you into daily contact with your pusher (the convenience store) wouldn't be the best solution.
430: According to the regulators (Gambling Commission and National Lottery Commission) legal gambling in the UK, including the Lottery, is worth about £7.5 billion a year. That's gross yield - i.e. what the operator takes in in bets and doesn't give out in prizes, but keeps for his own running costs, profits, and charitable causes.
That's about 0.5% of UK GDP. The $92 billion figure cited for the US is 0.6% of US GDP.
So, it looks entirely plausible. Brits lose £125 per head per year on gambling; Americans, who are richer, lose $400 a year.
Well, yes, inside the university math has different incentives since it doesn't require big grants (that pay overhead to the U). Departments can get a lot of teaching with requirements for other majors, too, so there's less incentive to "bring students along". Which, btw, is one thing that CS prof mentioned as lacking when he quit Stanford to offer his course online for free.
Here's the Stanford story.
http://allthingsd.com/20120125/watch-sebastian-thrun-leaves-stanford-to-teach-online/?mod=atdtweet
Americans, who are richer, lose $400 a year.
I wonder if we don't lose more than that. Brits can legally gamble in more ways than most Americans. I'm thinking mostly of sports betting, which I assume doesn't get reported because it is illegal in most places.
412 is odd. In our department some of the grad students get outside funding, but the rest rely on teaching for at least a couple of years of their funding. Also, most RA work is done either by undergrads or (if it's grant-funded) by hired non-students (usually people who want to go to grad school eventually). On the other hand, there are structural benefits (like, certain facilities cost less) to using undergrads in research that must have been put in place by somebody who was worried about concerns (getting undergrads involved in research) that are at least related to those in 412.
Poker is barely even gambling, since the better player usually wins.
Mark Twain had some fun with this.
I wonder if the 92 billion figure counts the churn. Even if you go to Vegas with $1000 and come home with $500, you've probably "lost" much much more than $500 since at various points you were up by a lot.
Anyhow, it's very common in casinos to see people who pretty obviously can't afford it making $1000 bets.
It specifically is the net loss, not the churn.
From 412:
An influx of undergraduates into the major prompted a disbursment of central university funds to employ more teaching assistants and lecturers thus helping to solve the problem of underemployed humanities Ph.D.s.
Teaching assistants have Ph.Ds? I guess I'm just nitpicking, because his analysis is right as far as the incentive to have more grad students goes.
Teaching assistants have Ph.Ds?
Assistant slots here (like, at this university, not just this department) go to interested grad students first and then to postdocs and other postdoctoral adjunct-y types. Although that didn't exactly seem like what he meant.
Disinterested grad students get nothing.
I'm pretty sure where I was, teaching assistant pretty much meant grad student, at least in the humanities.* (Lecturer often meant non-tenure, more or less permanent, guess which tenured prof is their spouse. Adjuncts in the sense of temporary labor were generally "visiting.") I don't think you had to be a student to be a research assistant, depending on the project.
*And then there's Berkeley, where they tried to do a find and replace of "teaching assistant" with "grad student instructor." I can't remember if the term change stuck. You'd hear both "TA" and "GSI" back in the day.
I was actually a TA for a postdoc because the overlap between a search vacancy and a faculty leave left a lecture course in need of an instructor. But that particular postdoc usually had a seminar teaching requirement - they were expected to teach their own classes. (The postdoc was compensated extra for the extra work of running a lecture course.)
454-- ah, you're right (what, do you think I read the linked article?). Still, the number seems pretty reasonable, if what he says about people spending 60 billion on lottery tickets is right.
The commenters in Yggles' post are correct. Even scientists want more TAs because more money is good. Which would you rather have, your half-army of full time RAs or your half-army of full time RAs plus several part-time TAs.
Not to mention that most professors would tell you that the productivity difference between an RA and a TA is undetectable.
I'm thinking mostly of sports betting, which I assume doesn't get reported because it is illegal in most places.
That's kind of weird, because off-track betting has been legal here for over 40 years. There are three or four bookies' shops on every high street. Most of it is horses and football, but people bet on other stuff too. There's one firm that's famous for offering numbers on pretty much anything you want. If I wanted to bet that Gingrich would beat Romney with a meerschaum tipped cane during the Oklahoma primary debate, Joe Coral would probably give me odds.
There is some off-track betting for horses here. It depends on the state. That's about it, I think.
If I wanted to bet that Gingrich would beat Romney with a meerschaum tipped cane during the Oklahoma primary debate, Joe Coral would probably give me odds.
Bet you $10 you couldn't get odds on that.
19: Stockbrokers don't gamble. They execute the gambles of their clients, and collect a fee for the service.
There is some off-track betting for horses here.
There was recently a giant, politically weird closure and sell-off of Off Track Betting in New York.
One former OTB I pass by every so often on the Upper West Side has a sort of beautifully seedy 1930s-style lobby. It is now occupied by a Bikram Yoga studio.
467: I live around the corner from that place. I remember the OTB as a window into the seediness that the boom years tried pretty hard to erase from Manhattan.
I saw and OTB in Astoria back in 2008 that looked basically like a bland room with some counters with windows and then some space to stand around in line or wait for results. I didn't go in, though.
boom years tried pretty hard to erase
And now the yoga has planted its flag.
I used to go into the OTB on Delancey Street annually in the late '90s as the first stage of a friend's Kentucky Derby party. That was a particularly seedy outpost. Average number of teeth per patron was probably 20.
I was also briefly involved in the city's failed attempt to sell OTB in 2001.
Average number of teeth per patron was probably 20.
My son's kindergarten is the same and not at all seedy.
The American toothless request that you use a different indicator for seediness.
My one and only trip to the OTB parlor, I joined my friend Patrick and his ladyfriend. Unfamiliar with what to do, I decided just to bet the same way as the ladyfriend, a strategy that unfortunately cost me all of the five dollars I had put down.
Never again will I be so quick to rely on Pat's gal's wager.
Who lives closest and has a tomato?
Those snipers I paid to go to Virginia sure haven't done their job.
My son's kindergarten is the same and not at all seedy.
Keep telling yourself that, Dr. Cosby.
I thought Forks, Washington was a fictional place, but I just looked on Google Maps, and not only is it real, but I've been there. I didn't find $5 there, though, which is too bad, because then maybe I would remember it better.
465 - and if you couldn't get odds on the high street, you could just go onto Betfair and offer them yourself, and someone would take you up on it.
C won about £800 over a year a littel while back doing matched betting. It looked like a fairly tedious process, but he enjoyed himself. He used to bet a lot, mostly on afternoons at the dogs in Oxford before I met him and started having babies and hoovering up all his disposable income.
If I wanted to bet that Gingrich would beat Romney with a meerschaum tipped cane during the Oklahoma primary debate, Joe Coral would probably give me odds.
There's an anecdote in this video about betting on the top Christmas single.
The other thing that stuck me from that video is that it says something about a project when somebody finds themselves saying, in retrospect, that it was really helpful that Matt Dillon was sober and could smooth things over with the cops. Perhaps not a good sign . . .
222: 218: Tripp, that is unspeakably sad. I am sorry.
And yet, and this is only a hunch, but I suspect it is true, if you dare to create genetic outliers, you dare to create great tragedy, along with the hope of a good outcome.
I have not heard many people talk about that trade-off. If anything, the assumption is the more people the better.
it was really helpful that Matt Dillon was sober and could smooth things over with the cops.
Matt Dillon the actor, or Matt Dillon the US Marshal from Gunsmoke? Because he's be really good at smoothing things over with the cops.
There is a large chain of betting shops that belongs to a bookie from Manchester name of Fred Done. He recently rebranded them to "Betfred - the Bonus King", but before that they just had a sign reading "Done Bookmakers".
The branch in Holme Wood, a huge grim council estate on the southern rim of Bradford (and therefore on top of a mountain whipped by either wet westerly winds that hadn't hit anything since Nova Scotia or freezing easterlies that hadn't hit anything since the Urals), got vandalised. There's a surprise.
Well, the vandals looked at the sign and decided to improve it. By tearing down the letters M, R, and S, so it read DONE BOOK AKE.