#nostalgia
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RIP Borders. I’d ask my parents to drop me off there or at Waldenbooks while they did the grocery shopping or other meetings. I must have read 3/4ths of the Animorph titles for free.
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About time.
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I’ve posted before about the enormous social problems with poker machines (what we call slots here) throughout Australia. Well… Shot (January 2018):
An ongoing fall in poker machine spending in South Australia has forced the state government to revise down its gambling tax revenue forecasts by $42 million
Chaser (Dec 2019):
A decision by the South Australian government to allow hotels, clubs and the Adelaide Casino to install poker machines that accept notes rather than only coins has prompted fierce criticism from crossbenchers and welfare groups, who claim it is a sop to the hotel industry that will only harm problem gamblers.
The government says the measure will bring South Australia into line with other jurisdictions, but social welfare advocates argue it will only increase the harms wrought by problem gambling.
This was passed by the conservative government - with the full support of Labor. Bipartisan bill. It turns out poker machine addiction is a problem for governments as well as gamblers.
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Benjamin Franklin organized a lottery to raise money to purchase cannon for the defense of Philadelphia. Several of these lotteries offered prizes in the form of “Pieces of Eight”. George Washington’s Mountain Road Lottery in 1768 was unsuccessful, but these rare lottery tickets bearing Washington’s signature became collectors’ items; one example sold for about $15,000 in 2007. Washington was also a manager for Col. Bernard Moore’s “Slave Lottery” in 1769, which advertised land and slaves as prizes in The Virginia Gazette .
At the outset of the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress used lotteries to raise money to support the Colonial Army. Alexander Hamilton wrote that lotteries should be kept simple, and that “Everybody … will be willing to hazard a trifling sum for the chance of considerable gain … and would prefer a small chance of winning a great deal to a great chance of winning little”. Taxes had never been accepted as a way to raise public funding for projects, and this led to the popular belief that lotteries were a form of hidden tax.
At the end of the Revolutionary War the various states had to resort to lotteries to raise funds for numerous public projects.
State-run lotteries are an ancient part of American culture, and it’s always weird as fuck to me, especially when the state lotteries run commercials. It’s like, my tax dollars are paying for commercials to convince me to place -EV bets and some of the proceeds go to pay for schools. Like WTF man, just tax us and give schools the money directly, this isn’t the 18th century. We hate taxes here but we love the idea of suckering in poor people with the promise of a longshot ticket to riches.
Hate on WN if you want, but this was fucking funny.
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We have those too. I don’t mind it. People like lotteries and it’s better for the government to run them than a corporation. Lottery addiction isn’t really a thing as far as I’m aware, top-heavy infrequent prizes are the wrong structure to generate addiction.
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I hate that every bar has a VLT/slot machine in Canada these days. So many standard bars have given up floor space for tables for machines which just sucks.
This seems contradictory: if playing lotto is just a fun, non-addictive pastime, then private companies should be running the games. It’s an entertainment industry like any other. If gambling is addictive, then maybe government should be running lotteries as though they were methodone clinics, but why in fuck are my tax dollars going to buy ads to convince me to gamble?
Seems to me the system is designed to chisel money from low/middle income people, a huge chunk of it goes to corporate middlemen, a pittance goes to the schools. Even the lucky guys who win big wind up spending it all on dumb consumerist shit. no one raises a fuss because it’s helping the schools or whatever.
I’d say lotteries are a mild social evil, but something people want to do. I generally support people being given the freedom to do things if they really want to, even if they’re harmful, and so I think the government should supply lotteries in a way designed to minimise harm. I do agree that there shouldn’t be ads for them, though. I don’t think advertising harmful and addictive products should be allowed at all. Tobacco advertising has been banned here for years, it is a mystery to me why alcohol and gambling ads haven’t suffered the same fate.
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I’m in a Starbucks and one Starbucks employee is giving another a Starbucks employee a pretty well informed history of the early Nazi Party. It seems purely academic…I think.
The government running lotteries is absurd imo. Gambling being illegal while the government runs lotteries is disgusting imo.
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The legal theory is that gambling is a public nuisance and usually allowed only where government explicitly chooses to permit it rather than something which is assumed to be legal unless government explicitly chooses to restrict it.
I don’t hate that idea, in theory. I don’t think I want to permit unregulated gambling for meaningful stakes.
Starbucks cup offers me a “merry coffee”!!! Trump lied!!!
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otoh:
It actually costs a lot of companies more money to put somebody on the product, to visually eyeball it and say, Is this up to standard, is it up to code? Is this going to get us sued? Did somebody tamper with this box in some way? And is this returnable? And if it’s clothing, it has to be re-pressed and put back in a nice packaging. And for a lot of companies, it’s just not worth it. So they will literally just incinerate it, or send it to the dumpster.
I hate to admit it, but I do basically the same thing all the time and routinely take perfectly usable items to the dump because there’s really nothing else I can do with them. Sure, I could take that 30 year old Corian sink to Habitat for Humanity and they’ll grudgingly accept it, but honestly it’s just adding another step and delay before it ends up in a landfill somewhere. They already have dozens of them out back that they literally can’t give away.
Is there somebody out there somewhere who could use my lumber scraps? Absolutely. I just have no way to get it to them in a way that’s cost effective for either of us. And I’m not going to give up any of my already limited storage space to hang on to something that’s only worth $10 because I might use it someday. It all goes in the trash, and then I buy it again in 6 months.
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I wonder if in the future, places like Goodwill will transition to more on demand transportation/delivery services rather than individual stores. Like you go online and say “hey that sink in this dude’s basement would be perfect”. The dude with the sink has agreed that when someone wants his shit he’ll take it to a designated local drop off, and the charity transports it to the person who needs it. Stuff like lumber can be done the same way but like you order 10 6 foot lengths of 2x4’s and the charity figures out where to source them based on algorithms or whatever.
I can’t tell if that would be way more efficient or way less efficient than the current system.
Google Matt Bevin right now, prepare to be enraged.
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