jjxw

The reasoning behind why lotteries can be damaging to the socioeconomically disadvantaged is similar to that of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs. It offers an escape and "hope", as some have put it for the lottery, but there is almost an infinitesimally small chance that something good will come out of it.

The problem with this is not people playing the lottery in general (even if it is objectively throwing away money). I've even bought into the office pool a few times more as "social insurance" than anything else. The problem IS that the lottery takes advantage of those who need that marginal dollar the most under the pretense of funding state education, which, according to John Oliver, doesn't even seem to be true[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PK-netuhHA

Better hope that if / when general intelligence AI arrives that there are isn't anything which optimizes for "bringing down the denominator" of the human population.

Ah, you are correct. The term I was actually looking for is moral hazard.

The reason why banks require evidence of ability to repay the loan is because, without them, there would be a huge incentive for borrowers to take loans without paying them back. This is where the adverse selection comes in - the information asymmetry results from the borrowers knowing what their intent for the loan is and the incentive to mislead the lender. This leads to lenders being more wary (and implementing requirements) when issuing loans.

Ah, I misunderstood. It looks like a version of this exists which provides tax incentives to hire veterans, food stamp recipients, and other disadvantaged groups.

https://www.doleta.gov/business/incentives/opptax/wotcEmploy...

In general, I agree, but there is a cost to such regulation in the sense that it would make banks more wary to lend to legitimate borrowers on the promise of future basic income payments. Making it illegal to seize basic income assets in the event of default creates a classic adverse selection problem where bad actors will have incentives to attempt to take a loan.

That being said, the point of a basic income in the first place is to introduce financial stability to all households so any costs associated with preventing lending on basic income collateral may be societally optimal.

The EITC has got you covered:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit

My understanding of most implementations of Basic Income is that the funds would come from taxes or budget cuts in other parts of the government rather than printing money which would reduce inflationary pressure. The problem with raising prices is that collective coordination would be difficult for goods which operate in a competitive market.

The most egregious example of trolling I've witnessed involves a case where wifi patent trolls have sued end user businesses (think hotels, coffee shops) which own and use routers. They did so intentionally because small businesses were not likely to go to court and just sent the troll money to "settle".

At least the legal system seems to have moved towards more heavily punishing blatant trolls more recently. I would hate to see what trolls get their claws sunk into if blockchain tech is heavily adopted for financial transactions.

Source for wifi trolling

http://www.essentialpatentblog.com/2013/04/innovative-wirele...

Very cool, thanks for the link. I'm interested in seeing how well this matches up with the Attorney General's data if they are not from the same source.

California also released a dashboard that covers arrests and the number killed by law enforcement which is based on data that is maintained by the CA Attorney General's Office:

http://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data

I've also done a little investigation into why the number of reported homicides by law enforcement during arrests has been trending upwards in recent years:

http://jonthewang.com/2015/10/06/homicide-by-law-enforcement...

That was the first thing I attempted to search for and the output from the site is:

Spanish: did you know that the popular anecdote about the Chevrolet Nova is an urban legend? Google for "snopes nova".

It's a nice detail.

It kind of was:

>“We discovered the tile using using a computer to exhaustively search through a large but finite set of possibilities,” said Casey. “We were of course very excited and a bit surprised to find the new type of pentagon.