It's about winning the lottery but still applicable to some extent, and shows how people's lives go horribly wrong.
Like without getting into nits, you can actually directly effect the direction and value of a company, but you can't affect the roll of dice or the output of a random number generators.
Risk in and of itself doesn't imply the entire thing is gambling; that said, investing by itself would be way closer to gambling in that context, imo
I'm saying the opposite of what you seem to be implying. I'm saying anyone can gamble or start a business, but it's no ones responsibility to make sure they have the option to do so.
Suppose another ape and I are out enjoying the State of Nature, and we both should have a round troy ounce of silver in our pockets, with heads and tails as an agreed convention. Suppose I were to say to the other ape, "on whose face does Fortune shine her rays?" and we were to flip both rounds, such that whomever showed heads had the better of it: were it both of us, we would exchange, but one head and one tails, well, one ape will leave the gamble richer and the other skint.
Tell me toolz, how should you prevent this encounter without committing a human rights violation? Show your work, please.
All I've said is that you, nor I, should be responsible for making this behavior possible - you seem to have misinterpreted my intent completely if you think the absence of a right is the same as a mandate against someones ability to participate freely as they wish with other consenting adults.
Not sure if that's true by number of gamblers, but my gut says it's mostly true weighed by the amount of money gambled away. I say mostly, because we don't count rich kids / oligarchs wasting money for fun, who might dominate the value chart.
Most people who are the poorest are usually the ones who know exactly where their dollars are going. They can tell you exactly how much a carton of eggs and milk are.
You're making the assumption that everyone plays the lottery because they think it is a smart financial decision.
On an individual level, gambling is roughly breaking even in the long run (say, 95% retention of the resources).
Yes, it is.
> It is a transfer of resources from one entity to another. It's a zero-sum game.
All real gambling consumes as well as transfers resources, and is, therefore, negative sum.
No it's not.
Are we "debating" like in first grade or what is this?
By your definition it seems literally everything is a "waste of resources"
Most activities use resources.
Many produce value and are not a waste of resources.
It's easy to say "well, lotteries have a negative expected payoff". And that's true, but it can still have a less negative payoff than a payday loan or having your car repossessed.
The utility of $2*X is not exactly twice $X. It can be more or less, and that can differ between different people.
I'm not sure this is a sound analogy, but imagine someone picking up cigarettes for the first time and building up tolerance over time as they go from one cig a day to two, three, four and so on. Now, compare that to someone suddenly smoking 10 cigs per day. The latter person is more likely to get wrecked from the side effects.
Edit: I checked your profile and saw that you're the co-founder of Industry Dive, damn. I love your newsletters and websites!...especially Payments and Banking Dive.
That said, it's more likely that someone whose life ended in poverty is not as smart as someone who can live comfortably. IQ generally correlates with income (you can google a few studies).
There are surely tons of reasons that can push smart people into poverty (bad health, poor environment leading to poor choices) but that shouldn't obscure the general trend.
That said, I think over a certain IQ, other traits of your personality or the environment will have the predominant effect in determining whether you'll end up poor or not.
Similarly, over a certain amount of money, I'm sure there will be more variance. Making 5k more than your peers doesn't mean you're smarter than them - and the fact that you're all able to earn a living and save some money means you're all smart.
There are plenty of horror stories that are below $10 million.
That Reddit comment is not about 'poor people', though it's true the scale is a bit different.
Assuming that was unintentional, now might be a good opportunity to reflect on unconscious bias.
I was in jail with a guy who was a total mess. Nice, but seemed pretty mentally-disabled.
One day a new guy came on the block. "Wow, what is George doing in here?" "You know him?" "Yeah, I know him. He is one of the greatest musicians I ever met. He can play any instrument like a savant. I knew him a few years ago, just after he inherited $4m when his father passed. He ended up getting in drugs and everyone would hang out at his house." "Wow, who was his dealer?" "Who was his dealer?! EVERYONE was his dealer!"
I'd been keeping George in coffee, because he didn't have a single cent on his commissary account (which is rare in jail, even the worst criminals usually have someone out there). Poor George had snorted or injected $4m of drugs and everyone had sold them to him and partied with him until all the money was gone and George's brain was cooked and he went around shaking his fist at the sky until he was arrested. And not one of his hundreds of "friends" would put a cent on his account.
https://news.yahoo.com/zappos-founder-tony-hsieh-didnt-17410...
This bankruptcy thing is a myth that seems to have been made up and won’t die. I’ve looked into this in the past and the only stats I could find that back it up are based on small winnings, not large winnings, contrary to your redditor’s claims, and the bankruptcy rates were temporary. Get this: the bankruptcy rates went down 2 years after winning between $50k-$150k, and then 3 years after that they returned back to normal. The returning back to normal from a low point was cherry-picked and reported widely as bankruptcy rates going up. Misleading, right? Here’s the Florida study this misinformation was based on: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~cle/laborlunch/hoekstra.pdf
The National Endowment for Financial Education has issued a press release about this bankruptcy misinformation: https://www.nefe.org/news/2018/01/research-statistic-on-fina...
I am grateful for this insight.