The near constant ads for online casinos here in 2021 caused me so much concern. I guess it's safer than crypto.
I find gambling so stressful that I can't even read about in novels without feeling unbearably anxious. Gambling is legal in New Orleans if you do it on a riverboat (I may have these details wrong) and my family for a long while would go every Friday. They never lost more than thirty or forty dollars, but it still bothered me.
This is my problem, though, probably due to the financial precarity I've been in for decades now, and I never even brought it up to them, because I'm a SAINT.
Sports gambling became legal in Ohio this year and the quantity of advertising for it is insane. During Jeopardy! (the only network tv I watch regularly), on my Twitter feed, on billboards... I don't like it.
Yes. Sports betting is worse because it takes jobs from bookies and probably makes for more sports radio shows with asshat hosts.
Against it in practice, for it in principle. I'm convinced that the meme stocks event happened party because there were no sports to bet on for a while and the empty compulsives who do that had to point their energy somewhere.
The Social dynamics of elderly taciturn guys who let all out when they gamble is interesting for me. I don't myself, except for an orphan 401(k). Not interested in casino games. I liked poker with friends years ago, but realized that we were basically exploiting each others' game weaknesses for money, and it was during grad school so there wasn't much extra. Different than just playing a game for points and the small pleasure of winning.
I admit that I thought (think) the meme stock thing was great. Putting a short squeeze on hedge funds is the best capitalism.
I'm expecting at least one major scandal around sports betting and throwing games/manipulating scores now that's a bigger thing again.
5: I knew some old ladies who played poker in the 80's and 90's but all their bets were with pennies, so maybe you lost $3 at most.
7: How much you willing to pay?
I thought about this more fully for the first time in a while on the occasion of online gambling being on the ballot in CA last year.
Broadly I think yes, it's similar to dangerous drugs in that it's correct to see preventing abuse as a public goal, even abuse that hurts only the self, but prohibition is unworkable.
I actually think the place-based bans we had historically stumbled into (two states + reservations) is a decent harm-reduction nudge. It exists for those determined to get it, but it takes a few hours of travel, or researching your way into illegal venues which will also be less convenient. It certainly keeps incidence lower than under full legalization.
Online gambling, especially post-smartphone, is an absolutely avoidable and harmful innovation. It effectively means people will be nudged to gamble, with zero friction. There would be ways to get around a federal ban if it still existed, but again those would be disincentivizing to the lazy susceptibles.
Even with it legal in many states now, a state level ban still has the same kind of disincentivizing impact, if a weaker one.
Distinguishing a harm reduction outlook from a moralizing one, I think it would be absolutely fine if there were a way to keep everyone's losses down to a thousand or two a year, maybe scaling with income. But that would require a more muscular surveillance state than we have now.
They should just ban online gambling. It is very destructive for a lot of people. It was illegal for a long time and that was fine. I think nudges as a concept is largely a way to avoid effective state action.
It does drive me insane that they can advertise stuff like "$500 Risk Free Bet", but honestly just ban it completely.
I guess it's a sign of the hegemony of the concept that I am painting outright bans as nudges!
Gambling is the least evil of addictive vices.
*It is uniquely egalitarian, because it costs rich people more than it costs poor people to get the same high, roughly proportionate to the difference in wealth. Think of two people who bet a week's pay to make the Superbowl exciting. Compare to two people who drink a fifth of vodka. This also makes gambling a good industry to tax heavily.
*It can be a very sociable activity, facilitating male bonding over the poker table or at the track. Less true when online.
*The only negative consequences of addiction are financial. A gambling addict may have to declare bankruptcy, but won't lose liver function or brain cells.
*Gambling improves one's math skills, useful in other parts of life. If math skills are sufficiently improved, gambling will stop.
*The only negative consequences of addiction are financial. A gambling addict may have to declare bankruptcy, but won't lose liver function or brain cells.
Yeah but you can tank the finances of your entire family pretty quickly, whereas you can only destroy your own liver.
I really shouldn't have taken 13 quite so seriously, methinks.
Anyone know where to get the best fava beans?
My first job was working at a newsstand: newspapers outside, also paperbacks, comics, porn, and racing publications inside.
Along with the daily Racing Form (in print for over a century, more than the Sun-Times can say), there were colored tip sheets put out by individual odds-meisters, probably there's some kind of title for the role, those also seem really persistent. The amount of effort to put those together, especially before computers, must have been just nuts. Since there was money at stake, couldn't cut too many corners, or the shoestring publishers would get things wrong. The basis of all of it would be keeping a history of past races, who trained, who cheats.
The narrow obsession of compulsive gamblers is something else to see, I worked with a few of them years ago. It's hard to put into words why that destructive compulsion is makes the people it catches, usually men, interesting to watch. I haven't seen Uncut Gems, but it's apparently a good depiction of the type.
there were colored tip sheets put out by individual odds-meisters, probably there's some kind of title for the role, those also seem really persistent
I think it's "tout"?
17.last Great movie
I had a housemate who played the horses. She had a system.' Most of them do.
I have a longer gambling story but it will have to wait till I'm back from the pub.
Not against it in principle. This is something I can be relatively libertarian about.
It's not for me, though. I'm trying to come up with circumstances where I'd enjoy gambling, and they all start with "I guess if I lived before the existence of computer games, a deck of cards is a multipurpose tool for many different games rather than just one, and money is a convenient way to keep score..."
I thought I knew how to play poker, but just looking at Wikipedia now, I don't recognize any specific version of the game from experience. I know how to play Hearts. My knowledge of Magic: the Gathering was encyclopedic until around when I had a kid, but I was drifting away from the game before that. Since then it's just games like Sleeping Queens, or computer or phone games.
Taking stupid risks seems to appeal greatly to some people whether financial or not. Nixon cogently said of himself in the Gannon interviews something like, when you started from nothing it made sense to try lots of things because you had nothing to lose, and then when you rise to power on the back of a lot of such risk-taking it's hard to stop. And I suspect you could paint Napoleon the same way.
18. I've read that but never heard it, similarly "tipster"
Holy shit, the green sheet still exists: https://greensheetracing.com/about-us/
Unfortunately the founder has a common name, otherwise I'd look for charging documents or ideally depositions to learn more.
My uncle's primary entertainment was betting on the ponies. But there was only a limited season at his local track. At least, before they started letting you bet on races at other tracks.
Which was a thing by the 90s or maybe late 80s. But you had to go to the track.
Pennsylvania was OTB, or used to. I haven't seen one in a long time.
Oh this thread will attract a special kind of spam I'd bet. I say they show up within 2 days, I'd put that at 7 to 4.
Have you ever noticed spam to gravitate to be on topic?
Anyway, I like horses and don't like how all the stupid gambling without horses makes it harder to the small business people with horse farms.
20. Darnielle is into M:tG. The dynamic with publisher choices affecting the game dynamics and expensive powerful game tokens I thought was pretty interesting, does anyone know if there's a compact written summary anywhere?
21 is a connection I hadn't made. They're on youtube, that looks promising, thanks!
I GOT THE HORSE RIGHT HERE
HIS NAME IS PAUL REVERE
AND THERE'S A GUY WHO SAYS IF THE WEATHER'S CLEAR
CAN DO
CAN DO
THIS GUY SAYS click here to meet courteous and friendly escorts in suburban Chittagong!
29. Not really by topic, but I thought that someone here had noticed that old pages attracting spam had a few keywords?
Spambots are preferable to whoever is earworming me with show tunes.
I was thinking about Damon Runyon yesterday, I know the musical but haven't ever read any of the stories. Here is a snippet of his biography, I would like a Claire Denis or Michel Hanneke treatment:
Runyon had become infatuated with Patrice Amati del Grande, a Mexican woman he had first met while covering the Pancho Villa raids in 1916 and discovered once again in New York when she called the American seeking him out. Runyon had promised her in Mexico that if she would complete the education he funded for her, he would find her a dancing job in New York. She became his companion after he separated from his wife. After Ellen Runyon's death, Runyon and del Grande married on July 7, 1932;[15] that marriage ended in 1946 when she left him for a younger man. Runyon died in New York City from throat cancer in late 1946, at age 66. His body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered from a DC-3 airplane over Broadway in Manhattan by Eddie Rickenbacker on December 18, 1946. This was an infringement of the law but widely approved.
I only know Damon Runyon from the Johnny Mercer song "My New Celebrity Is You" that lists dozens of contemporary names.
20: Who's Darnielle? And a compact summary of what, just how to play M:tG?
Well, to put it very compactly, you make decks and take turns drawing cards from your decks. Each player starts with 20 life points in the main version of the game and the main way to win is to reduce your opponent's life to zero, such as by attacking them with creatures represented by cards, before they do the same to you. There is a competitive scene to the game I could never have spoken to in great detail. There are many variations of deck construction rules, ranging from "players open packs around a table and make decks out of the random cards they got in those packs" to "almost all cards ever printed are legal, including some worth thousands of dollars". But I gather that the most popular style of play is around tables at home with friends, if you have any of those. Personally, most of my playing for the last few years I played was at Friday Night Magic at a local game store, playing against strangers or near-strangers.
I'd be happy to look up articles that look relevant if you'd like to be more specific?
My fantasy solution is to deny the protection of limited liability to companies acting as the house. You can host a poker game, but you can't incorporate. Whoever is running the house should face the same risk of ruin as the people who are betting.
Suddenly investing in a casino becomes a lot less attractive.
38 looks like a good idea, but I don't think incorporation is why the house always wins.
38: Given that the house always wins on average, and casinos limit maximum bets so they can't lose too much on one whale, I wonder how much of a dissuader that would be. It would prevent stock market-level money from flowing in, at least.
My brother and I have thoroughly and unreflectively assimilated our sainted father's hostility toward gambling, an antipathy only increased by exposure to Bill Simmons and worse sports gambling jackasses.
In unrelated news, we are white people from New England.
John Darnielle is the lead singer (and for a long time the only member) of the band The Mountain Goats, best known for their songs This Year and No Children. He's also a National Book Award finalist for his debut novel, and recently guest starred in Episode 4 of Poker Face where he plays the guitarist in a one-hit-wonder rock/metal band. He tweets a lot about M:tG and once responded to me when I tweeted at him about M:tG.
Yeah, its not perfect. Cutting limited liability also wouldn't do anything about state-sponsored gambling, aka the lottery.
If you want to see destructive gambling, stand in line at the convenience store behind a poor person spending their last $80 on scratch-off tickets.
I moralize about gambling, but its not the bettor who has the moral problem, its the house.
appreciate your carefully rendering M:tG meaning I only lost 50 msec thinking you were tweeting MTG. Could have been much worse.
I only know Damon Runyan because I had a magic book by Harry Anderson, the actor who played the judge on Night Court, and he told some Damon Runyan anecdotes.
I'm in the same boat as heebie in having zero interest in gambling personally but no strong moral intuition about it.
37. I don't understand well enough to have a specific question- probably caught up in your "variation of deck construction rules", apparently there was a change in what the publishers did in the past about creating cards that were powerful.
35 is amazing, and that prompted me to read the wikipedia entry for Eddie Rickenbacker which is also impressive.
He has an airport in Ohio named after him, so he must have done something horrible.
My favorite compulsive gambler in history is Fyodor Dostoyevsky. His wife would send him off to get medicine for their sickly child, and he would instead get on a a train to get to the nearest gambling resort. Two hours after he started gambling on the roulette wheel, he would be rich. Two hours later he would be completely broke, and have no choice but to seek out a Russian friend to loan him money for the train ride home. At the train station he would start thinking about going home to his wife days late and without even the medicine for their child, and he would race back to the casino. Again he would be briefly rich before blowing it all. Then he would have no choice but to go to his arch enemy Turgenev to beg for money. Turgenev would laugh at him and then give him the money. Having reached the apogee of humiliation, Fyodor would finally go home.
Given what passed for medicine back then, probably didn't hurt the kid.
I'm actually quite surprised how many people here haven't heard of Damon Runyon. Worth looking out his stuff, if you haven't. I would say he's the American Wodehouse.
My late grandfather discouraged my father from drinking and gambling by asking him, when he was a schoolboy, which of the other boys at school got picked up in the nicest cars, and pointing out that the answer was "the ones whose fathers are bookies or brewers".
This also led my father to become a socialist, which probably wasn't intended.
Reading about his work, I think Runyon's heavy use of contemporary slang, even if a good chunk of it is still recognizable, probably aged his work pretty fast for the public. Plus it's mostly short stories - that takes a lot to overcome.
57: but you could say exactly the same about Wodehouse!
Is the slang in Wodehouse contemporary, or nonce creations? In any case Wodehouse was writing for an American audience eager for local color.
pointing out that the answer was "the ones whose fathers are bookies or brewers".
I remember hearing the story that the song, "Shingling the Rum Seller's Roof" (lyrics) was written as a temperance song, but had such a catchy tune that it ended up getting adopted as a drinking song.
I tried to read Wodehouse, but put it down because the language annoyed me. At least twice this happened.
Speaking of gambling addiction the documentary The Doughnut King is quite good but the title character ends up becoming very successful, developing a gambling addition, and then losing everything.
Why is heebie hugging a high school dance team?
I think 10.3 got it right. I suppose someone should research to prove it, but I can't believe that gambling catastrophes haven't increased since the old status quo was upended.
What I do know is that my personal happiness has ben infringed by the massive spread of gambling. I'm naturally risk-averse*, so gambling has absolutely no appeal to me. However, the spread of gambling culture has ruined things I DO enjoy, in particular baseball, where all of the advertising is now for gambling, and where gambling-oriented discourse has become vastly more common. Sometimes I want to hear about sports; I never, ever want to hear about people betting on sports. The knowledge that all of this is in support of an essentially immoral industry just makes it all worse.
PS - Watching the entire run of The Sopranos last year, it was interesting how the "degenerate gambler" was held up as a uniquely contemptible figure.
Yeah. Let's not let anyone but me ruin baseball in Pittsburgh.
My association with gambling is my Vietnamese friends in high school whose fathers were bankrupting their families. They hated it the way you would hate anything that was continuously consuming your whole family's efforts towards betterment. I remember my friend crying and asking why her dad had to go to the underground Chinese casinos and not the regulated above-ground casinos where at least the odds were what they were said to be and not rigged.
Haven't thought much about gambling in twenty years but there's a real self-destructive addictive gambling streak in Asian cultures. It really grinds people and families up.
As for nudges, my rule of thumb is that they should align to combat denial. Denial fucks things up and should be countered where possible.
As for nudges, my rule of thumb is that they should align to combat denial.
I may not be understanding fully - how might that work in this case? You can gamble as long as you have a record of talking to your family about it?
I don't trust nudges for shit. The original idea of a nudge was to trick people into put more of their savings into 401(k), which are a scam to get middle class people to lock up their capital in Wall Street for their entire working life, only to have it be drained by the high cost of elder care at the end.
Nudges are what neoliberals use as bait.
Twenty-fucking-five to one
Me gambling days are done
I bet on a horse called the Bottle of Smoke
And my ol' horse won
Stewards inquiries, swift and fiery, I had the Bottle of Smoke
Inquisitions and suppositions, I had the Bottle of Smoke
Fuck the stewards, a trip to Lourdes
Might give the old fuckers the power of sight
Screaming springers and stoppers and call out coppers
But the money still gleams in my hand like a light
Twenty-fucking-five to one
Me gambling days are done
I bet on a horse called the Bottle of Smoke
And my ol' horse won
Priests and maidens drunk as pagans, they had the Bottle of Smoke
Sins forgiven and celebrations, they had the Bottle of Smoke
Fuck the yanks and drink their wines
The moon is clear, the sky is bright
I'm happy as the horse's shite
Up came the Bottle of Smoke
Twenty-fucking-five to one
Me gambling days are done
I bet on a horse called the Bottle of Smoke
And my ol' horse won
Old Stewball was a racehorse
And I wished he were mine
He never drank water
He always drank wine
His bridle was silver
And his mane it was gold
But worth of his saddle
Has never been told
The fairgrounds was crowded
And old Stewball was there
But the betting was heavy
On the bay and the mare
Oh, way up yonder
Ahead of them all
Came prancing and dancing
My noble Stewball
If I bet on the grey mare
And I bet on the bay
And if I'd bet on old Stewball
I'd be a free man today
Oh, the hoot owl she hollers
And the turtle dove moans
I'm a poor boy in trouble
I'm a long way from home
Old Stewball was a racehorse
And I wished he was mine
He never drank water
He always drank wine
I worked night shifts at a convenience store that sold lottery tickets. Every payday, people who likely earned less than $800 every two weeks would come in and blow $90 - 120 on scratch tickets. We sold a $10 scratch ticket that promised a minimum $7 payout. But the $7 payout was in coupons for more scratch tickets!
One dude always bought $90 in scratch tickets. He would play them and then buy more until he ran out of money. All of his winnings would go to buying more tickets. He would get progressively more desperate as he ran low on money. But when he finally ran out he would almost seem relieved. He would joke about "having to work another two weeks" and then leave.
I think the question is how much misery of the few are you willing to accept for the pleasure of the many.
@71 Great song - my father sang it to me & I sing it to my children.
I wonder if capping scratch ticket denominations at $5 would help.
@74 - they would just buy more tickets. The addicts were wagering a sum of money, not purchasing a number of tickets. The patrons that bought a fixed number of tickets (usually 1 or 2) didn't have a problem.
Against it, but not because I think it's a nudge, but because it's destructive and ought not to be sanctioned. I worked at a pharmacy that sold lottery tickets and there were regulars similar to what nope describes.
What if they made it so the tickets took like five minutes to scratch?
Maybe we could direct a portion of people's lottery investments into a 401k. Subject to work requirements and income verification, of course.
OT 80s question: What does "I smell like I sound" mean? What could it mean?
Thanks. Obvious once you point it out. Wolves must fart like dogs.
That song has a weird music video. Was it influenced by Raiders of the Lost Ark?
OK, it was indeed glossed by one of the creators as "Indiana Jones is horny and wants to get laid".
By someone his dad just laid a few days prior.
38 I don't have a big fix, but I would bar casinos from banning anyone for winning. Getting sloppy drunk and assaulting the servers? Absolutely. Winning at blackjack, either because they count or have some other thing: Nope. You either let everyone play, by an established set of rules, or you don't offer the game.
We had a ballot measure on lotteries long ago. I voted no, and would again, but a lot of people -- including the people who play -- voted yes.
The truly scammy thing about the lottery in MA is that most of the tax revenue goes to towns that are savvy about getting it, aka rich ones. And most of the people buying tickets are not rich.
Tim and I went to a hotel in Quebec near where my mother's family used to spend summers. Now there's a casino attached. A subset of the guests at the hotel are old people who come in on buses to play the slot machines.
Also in Quebec, the casinos will have fireworks on Canada day and all kinds of tacky crap. We let a casino in, and I guess the hotel jobs were pretty good. I haven't been to the casino in Everett, but the dog racing track in East Boston that went under was pretty gross as are the casinos boat litter the landscape in Quebec.
The truly scammy thing about the lottery in MA is that most of the tax revenue goes to towns that are savvy about getting it, aka rich ones. And most of the people buying tickets are not rich.
Yeah, government-run gambling often effectively functions as an extremely regressive tax. You see this with some Indian tribes too, especially the Navajos once they finally started building casinos.
They built casino in south Baltimore and a chunk of the money goes to subsidize the horse racing industry, lest those bucolic horse farms in Howard County fall upon hard times.
For a long time one of the justifications I heard for state lotteries and other such authorized gambling systems was that they were a sensible alternative to mob-run numbers rackets and the like. That is, gamblers gonna gamble, the only question is who gets the take? As someone who believes in harm reduction for drugs, for example, this makes sense, but it doesn't really address the edge cases of people who maybe weren't into gambling.
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In high school in Texas, you have to take 2 years of a foreign language. TIL that computer science counts as a foreign language in this weird state.
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That was true when I was in college.
Computer science counts as an arts class in our high school.
Somewhere in the archives is the story I told about losing a quarter in Vegas.
"All of his winnings would go to buying more tickets"- We often get scratchies as stocking stuffers at Christmas. On the occasions we've won something and I take it to the store to redeem, the clerks are usually surprised I want the cash and not more tickets.
The Everett one is supposed to have good restaurants but I don't want to go to them because ugh they're attached to a casino.
My Italian grand in-laws had some connection to running numbers rackets in their town. They also twice won the grand prize, a free car, in their local charity raffle. I suspect that was not random chance.
@90 The thing is, harm reduction doesn't mean the state starts selling drugs. That kinda changes the incentive structure for the state.
The thing is, harm reduction doesn't mean the state starts selling drugs.
That is exactly what it means with alcohol specifically in many states.
That kinda changes the incentive structure for the state.
I guess Oregon isn't one of the states where the state itself sells the liquor so that scandal isn't directly related to the incentive structure. There's some weird regulatory setup with perverse incentives though.
Or maybe it is? That article is confusing.
They're the state where the same bottle always has the same price everywhere in the state?
88: Even my horrible Republican uncle who worked for one of MA's Republican Governors (Frank Sargent) was opposed to the lottery. And he turned into a Fox-news kind of Republican, mostly. He's definitely vaccinated, though.
I mean, Fox-news is now the moderate kind of Republican. They are like the anaerobic bacteria that farted out so much oxygen that they could only survive in narrow niches.
The thing is, harm reduction doesn't mean the state starts selling drugs.
It should. If the state can become the dealer for the addicts who consume 90% of the drugs, selling dodgy shit on the black market becomes a far less lucrative line of work.
Spike, I think the distinction here is between the state providing drugs on prescription to addicts, which is a good idea, and the state *selling drugs for profit* which would be bad.
Anyway if you gamble you have a 10% chance of developing a gambling problem but if you get married you have a 45% chance of divorce so the state should definitely stop encouraging people to get married.
Funny this is the one thing I am super moralistic about.
Just can't be in favor of something that destroys lives in a flash and benefits primarily the rich investors.
It destroys many lives...there is nothing in the world more depressing than the poor part of Vegas.
As an industry it's the absolute worst.
Funny this is the one thing I am super moralistic about.
Just can't be in favor of something that destroys lives in a flash and benefits primarily the rich investors.
It destroys many lives...there is nothing in the world more depressing than the poor part of Vegas.
As an industry it's the absolute worst.
53: My favorite compulsive gambler in history is Fyodor Dostoyevsky. His wife would send him off to get medicine for their sickly child, and he would instead get on a a train to get to the nearest gambling resort.
And quite self-aware. One of my favorite sequences in literature is when Dmitri (in Brothers K) faced with some impossible debt unexpectedly comes by the money and then uses it to finance a debauch in a nearby town. Filled with remorse he manages to debase himself in wrangling up the sum again and then promptly uses it to rerun the exact same party to the same town.
Never more humanity than Dmitri in the sleigh on the way to 2nd debauch.
Anyway, that's how I remember it, and I categorically reject any attempts at correction.
I only remember that the four brothers teamed up to kill their father.
109: Anyone in the publishing business lurking? Moby's Cliff Notes to the Classics! Need I say more?
108: That's how I remember it too. 53 is also based on memory and is likely a composite of numerous episodes. I read a biography of Dostoyevsky a few years ago that seemed pretty long to me, but was a condensed version of a multi-volume biography.
I guess you could say Anna Dostoyevskaya was warned. They met when he hired her to take dictation when he was writing a short novel called The Gambler.
Were there only three brothers: holy, angry, and miscellaneous?
I was thinking there was a horny brother, but that's the father.
112: Yes, there were just the three brothers. (Read the book last year.) But I like it much better when you just assume you are right, so I didn't say anything.
114: I think there were 4 brothers. But I guess that's a matter of opinion.
I did read the whole book. But it was for a class in college, so it's been a while.
50
apparently there was a change in what the publishers did in the past about creating cards that were powerful.
Sure. It was comical how much they misunderstood or didn't care about balance in the very early game. Here are three cards from the first widely printed set: Healing Salve, Lightning Bolt, Ancestral Recall. You can see they have similar structures: one of a certain symbol in the top right, "Instant" between the picture and the text box, and the text box simply says that you get 3 of something. Note the difference in price tags.
Mark Rosewater, the lead designer of the game, has written probably millions of words by now about game design, both about M:tG itself and general game design principles, for budding designers and fans of the genre and stuff. Most articles there wouldn't be interesting to non-Magic players, but here's one about game design in general, like "randomness is good but shouldn't be the whole of the game" and "having a story helps".
Isn't Smerdyakov a half-brother of the other three?
That's who I called angry brother.
Well, I don't want to give any spoilers, but there's the 3 official brothers - the oldest Dmitri (see 107), who roughly represents the body, Ivan, the middle child, famously the author of "The Grand Inquisitor" who roughly represents the intellect, and Alyosha, the youngest, who roughly represents the soul. And there's Smerdyakov, who is rumored to be the illegitimate son of Fyodor.
117: I guess I screwed up the tags in the second link, sorry. Let's try this.
Thanks, that was interesting! My son drew alternate monopoly boards when he was little, changing the prices really changes the game.
I've only read Crime and Punishment, but I think it has to be read with a level of black comedy, that practically everyone, not just Raskolnikov, are blundering about, stuck in their own heads, and completely unable to stop their own self-destructive behavior even as they are aware it's ridiculous- a bit like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia perhaps. (Only a couple of exceptions - Porfiry Petrovich, Dunya.)
I tried to read that but only got through the crime part.
I am informed that the It's Always Sunny characters' obliviousness is in fact part of the show's appeal.
120: this reminds me of the glorious moment when R/enato P/aroni told us that there are five muscles that control your turnout, like the five brothers Karamazov, and that therefore we would dance in honour of Dostoevsky in the next exercise.
A beat.
Then one of my fellow students breaks in: "Three. There are three brothers."
"What do you mean?"
"I have a PhD in Russian literature, darling, that's what I mean."
Incredible level of silent laughter.
114: (Read the book last year.)
Oh hey, time passes! I just finished Stalingrad.
127: Oh hey, there aren't any Dostoevsky ballets, are there? Am I forgetting an obvious one? (Partial credit for the Henze/Bachmann setting of The Idiot; I wasn't sure it ever got a real performance with dancers but maybe?)
I read Stalingrad a few years back. Probably the same book. Really not cheering, so I don't read things like that now.
I actually saw a ballet performance of The Idiot choreographed by and starring Valery Panov. That was back when Russian ballet dancers that defected were great heroes.
Panov was guest choreographer and principal dancer with the Berlin Opera Ballet between 1977 and 1983. There he choreographed several ballets, including Cinderella, The Rite of Spring, The Idiot, and War and Peace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valery_Panov
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Trump just accused DeSantis of pedophilia/grooming, and one of the known bottomfeeders responded by connecting Trump with Epsten. The GOP primary is going to be something.
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131: Eh, it's a low bar, but I'm glad Olga Smirnova left. I have every intention of seeing more ballet this year, but so far I've blown off the contemporary series that seemed most up my alley, so intentions are meager. Maybe I can use some kind of "if so-and-so can defect from their country, you can buy a single ticket to a show and attend it for fun" mind trick.
Thinking it over, probably everyone who tried to stage/compose/choreograph a "Brothers Karamazov" ballet would quickly have succumbed to madness.
I don't even have a ballerina I don't like. My grandfather apparently named a dog after his favorite umpire, so I get that people have different vibes.
Is the point with the Amish dog steeling scam that Amish people don't use credit cards and so are more vulnerable to check fraud?
I think they just have better tasting puppies.
That scam is amazing even by Santos standards. I'm not really clear on how the economics of it work. He was selling the puppies for less than he purportedly paid for them, but I guess if he paid for them with bad checks it doesn't matter?
Sometimes you see a scam and think "That's worse than getting s job. "
Not if you're George Santos, apparently.
It's like he's going for a record in bizarre dog-related scandals.
Yes - doesn't matter if he paid $800 per dog and adopted them for $50, that $50 is profit when the first check was bad.
Mildly clever, I would think, that he thought to get purebreds, since people would presumably be more likely to come out to adopt such dogs over the mixes that are more likely to be real rescues.
I mean he has to pay for the driving and somehow take care of the dogs while he gets them to the people who want them. It's a lot of work for what seems like not that much money.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking of above. Plus, you got to advertise to find customers.
As usual on Friday afternoons, I took off from work and went skiing today. I got into a conversation on the chairlift about how it could be that Trump lost money in the casino business. My theory, 200% fact free, was that he's a dope and had agreed to terms with the mafia (small M because I'm not sure who exactly I really mean) that (a) no one with any sophistication would have accepted -- perhaps too early in the negotiation -- that (b) didn't leave him enough to make money himself plus pay out all the freebies that I assume one has to do in the business.
No one here knows less about this than me. Does anyone know more? Or have better fact-free speculation?
So much crime seems to happen because people can't price risk.
145 before seeing 144, but it's related.
Anyway, I stayed in Trump's Taj Mahal. It's maybe 50% of my experience of New Jersey.
Maybe they lost money because of the expense of making the entire bathroom out of marble?
144 - IIRC he just made the mistake of getting into a saturated and declining market. The house can't lose in a game of chance, but if no one comes to gamble the casino can definitely lose, because it can't cover costs of staff etc. And fewer and fewer people have been going to gamble in Atlantic City.
When it finally closed in 2016 the Taj hadn't been owned by Trump for years. His creditors took it in 2009 and sold it to Carl Icahn.
Just finishing up a few days in Lancaster*. First day driving east of town noticed several kennels and discussed how we've known several folks who have come over here from Pittsburgh for digs. That evening saw the Santos story.
*Two notes on Lancaster:
1) For the size of place it seems to have pretty good food. Central Market is great.
2) If you are here in late winter/early spring it is definitely worth the drive about 25 miles north to the Middle Creek wildlife refuge (even for non-birders). The day we were there there were 50-100,000 snow geese and several hundred Tundra Swans. When they got spooked and most took off en masse it was really something.
re: Brothers K I will repeat my glib assessment that it is quite the slog but really gets going after about page 400. So hang in there.
So my gambling story. I was very close to my grandfather and used to regularly spend long weekends or a week at a time at their place in Bensonhurst. He used to play the horses, mostly the trotters which were notorious for having the reputation of being fixed. It wasn't a serious problem, he still had plenty of money for the house and other expenses and quite a bit even for collecting art and violins (his night job was as a violinist in Broadway pits and for the NBC Symphony Orchestra, though his day job was as a clerk at Western Union) but it was a regular thing with him. One day when I was about 10 or 11 he takes me down to the basement which I loved, it was chock full of books and various art treasures that he didn't have space to store in the rest of the house. He pulls out two large shoe boxes full of gambling receipts and an old adding machine and tells me he wants me to find out how much money he's won over the years. So I added it all up and found out that over what must have been 30 or more years he'd lost $12,000! That was brand new Cadillac money back then. To this day I've never even bought a lottery ticket. I still wonder if he did that intentionally to inoculate me against gambling. By the time I'd thought to ask him he was gone.
When I did construction work I'd see all these fools just packing the local OTB, which was right next to the bank our checks were drawn on. Always shook my head at that.
The spambot is polite enough to always posts 500 line comments under the same name. Is it possible to just block posts from that name?
154: that's a great story. Of course I didn't know your grandfather, so I could be completely wrong, but my guess is that he really thought that he had made money gambling. I think of the people at the drug store that I worked that bought 10 or more Pick 3 lottery tickets day after day. It didn't require any complicated math to figure out that the times they won the $500 grand prize didn't make up for all the money they spent, but they didn't think of it that way, because the times they won were so thrilling and memorable, while all the times they lost were so easy to forget.
156: betting on races is different, because it isn't guaranteed that you'll lose. If you study the different horses, you might have insight into who will do better. But you should never bet more than you can afford to lose.
I buy a lottery ticket sometimes when it's really high. I know the chances of my winning are miniscule, but somebody wins, and I figure that the $3 is worth the fantasy of what I would do with the money. Maybe, I spend $10/ year that way.
It's a lot of work for what seems like not that much money.
Maybe it was an error on his part, sure; he was youngish. But on top of making a bit of money, maybe he was also trying to meet potential marks and establish himself as a good, charitable guy in their minds.
My father-in-law was talking about a friend of his who was complaining that his (very elderly) dad didn't use the little rewards card when he (the dad) played slot machines. Since the IRS gets reports of big wins but not how much you played (unless you use the rewards card and report it yourself) and the dad gambled for many hours a week, there would be a tax bill that the son had to pay (because the father gambled his income). My f-i-l pointed out that if you priced it out as a form of elder care, the gambling was still the cheapest option.
158: I also saw in some thread or article about the dog adoption scam testimony from the person who had basically talked the police out of prosecuting Santos and he'd had her fostering or housing the dogs for him before the adoption events, iirc a LOT of them and she was quickly disillusioned by the deal not being what she thought. So just scams built on scams on scams.
I'm guessing that there are turtles under the scams.
162: And Dostoevsky under the turtles? Someone Russian seems likely at any rate.
I would start yelling at random strangers that I hear speaking Russian on the street near me, but I've realized that I can't tell Russian from any other Slavic language so I could be yelling at a Ukrainian.
129: Oh hey, time passes! I just finished Stalingrad.
Neat! It's staring at me from the ambitious part of the bookshelf. Plus I've got three other Grossmans (Grossmen? Grossmänner?) waiting on my kindle: The Road, Everything Flows, and An Armenian Sketchbook. Did I ever post a link to my review of Life and Fate?
Thanks for the reminder of that previous thread! I was apparently in fine fettle:
"Platonov is metal played in cyclopean temples by beings from non-Euclidean dimensions beyond the ken of mortal men."
"Your verstage may vary, of course."
Have you taken an afternoon or so to read Ivan Denisovich? My possibly indefensible view is that that book and Neuromancer are the two essential novels for understanding the second half of the twentieth century.
Here's what I wrote about Karamazov:
https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/11/30/the-brothers-karamazov-by-fyodor-dostoevsky/
I guess I should mention the Stalingrad I read is a nonfiction account of the battle.
150: One day too late! We're flying out tomorrow. Although husband is contemplating a detour on the way to the airport.
168: Ah, were you at the sustainable agriculture conference?
Monocropping corn. It's the future of farming.
Apparently, a U.S. jet shot down a UFO over Canada. It's probably just something from China, but maybe further away.
I don't think a policy of "shoot down all the UFOs" is going to serve us well in the long run.
It'll probable be good for Biden politically in the short term, though. Americans love that shit.
You made me go find the book. Yes, Beevor.
I did not know that Rihanna is the wealthiest musician. No wonder she doesn't tour.
Bold move to go with Klan rally costumes for the halftime show.
The Chiefs are winning because it's been decades since Eagles fans have thrown batteries at Santa Claus.
There. Someone in a Philadelphia mall found a Santa suit and fixed things.
The Eagles need to have their best six second offense.
Dave Grohl is doing commercials for Crown Royal?
PS Alexandra Popoff's VASILY GROSSMAN AND THE SOVIET CENTURY is a very good biography of the guy.
I feel sufficiently informed about Dave Grohl.
I couldn't figure out why this thread was so long based on looking at the scrollbar and then I saw the comments by our dear friend salma/khan.
Well that's a change from the usual spam. I also don't know whether to laugh or be appalled at the pseud.