So I entered this weird place in Montana, with colorful machines everywhere. A more experienced friend instructed me to play a certain machine, in which I put $5 and got 100 virtual "tokens" in exchange. Then the machine asked me to pick 7 random numbers from a 10x10 grid. I touched the 7 numbers, and pressed a flashy "Go" button. The machine "randomly" (of course I have no certainty that it was truly a random process) picked 7 numbers, and only 1 of mine matched. Total gains: 0. I repeated the process several dozen times: select your numbers, press a button, watch the machine make funky sounds as it "randomly" selects number, see if yours match. The best round I got was when 3 of mine matched, and I got back something like 10 credits, going from 47 to 57. 10 minutes later, I was at 0.
It strikes me as a tragedy of our modern society that such contraptions make for a significant portion of state income, and that they are as popular as they are. It is sad that the average American citizen does not have a sufficient grasp of basic probabilities to even consider putting money in such a machine, because it means that the school system essentially fails at preparing kids for the real world. And it is sad that governments are encouraging those temples for theft to prosper the way they do. Because it really is theft - just a kind of theft where the victim is coaxed into it with the help of smoke, mirrors, and free booze (not unlike the phone scams that prey on the elderly and manage to extract thousands of dollars from them). And not only is it institutionalized theft, it is institutionalized classist theft, as the vast majority of the victims are from the lowest socio-economical classes of society.