tsotha

I agree with this. Steam has hundreds of titles that are worth the $5 or $7 they charge. You could never bring a title like that to a console without jacking up the price.

Lately people in my social circle have been getting together on a weekend afternoon and playing a cheap game. Usually they don't have much depth, but if I get four or five hours of play out of a game that cost $4 I'm happy.

Even the mob takes lottery ticket money up front. That's not really an issue unless you're borrowing from them to play. But if you're borrowing to play you could just as easily be borrowing for the state lottery.

Yes. Preventing SQL injection attacks is very, very easy. To have something like that in your code in 2015 is inexcusable.

>My point was that "I have no other options available to me" is only ever true for poor people.

And my point was if you have no other options the military probably won't take you either.

They'd probably start operating on the dry cleaning model. The shop has one employee who takes custody of your bike. That night it gets loaded on a truck and taken somewhere cheaper. It's repaired using lower cost labor and shipped back to the shop the next night.

So the bike shop is still there, but it has only one employee and nothing gets repaired while you wait.

I support it too. If it takes more money to attract people to work at your business, then you have to pay more. And charge more for your product. Your competition will be paying more, too, so it's not like you're at a disadvantage.

On the other hand, I don't actually live in SF, so if it costs $100 to buy a pizza there I don't really care.

Are you saying you think there's resistance here to an organic rise in wages? I don't see it.

>Aren't government programs in the US globally famous for being woefully inadequate and embarrassing?

Only to people who haven't actually looked at them. US welfare programs are certainly adequate to ensure nobody goes hungry. If children are going hungry it means their parents are spending money earmarked for food on something else.

>A bit tangential, but I'd also argue that the military as recourse is, itself, an unfair burden on poor people.

Not borne out by the statistics. The average recruit comes from a family that's better educated and wealthier than the average American. The real problem with poor people using the military to lift themselves out of poverty is so many of them can't enlist as a consequence of obesity or a criminal record.

The idea is everyone ends up better off because you don't need a giant civil service bureaucracy to apply arcane rules about who does and does not qualify for various subsidies.

Oh yes. What could an HN story that involves poverty be without yet another round of "You don't know poor people. Let me tell you about poverty."

Whenever I see a NYT headline that starts "The Myth of...", I know whatever they're pooh-poohing is true.

I would still be pretty comfortable at 20:1, but I probably wouldn't bet very much since the payout is so small.

Poverty statistics in the US don't include government programs. How many of those kids are hungry after welfare and food stamps?

Uh huh. How many of those kids are there, you figure, on a percentage basis?

If by "difficult to teach" you mean kids who cause problems for the other kids, then yeah. I went to a Catholic high school, and they did not tolerate disruptions. That allowed them to have classes with almost 50 kids and still have better than 95% of the graduating class going on to a four year college.

I'm sort of curious as to where these buildings are. I've never seen one on the US west coast.

I'm skeptical this has any effect on poverty. Poor people who buy lottery tickets wouldn't spend the money on job training if they couldn't buy lottery tickets. They'd find a bookie and bet on sports, or they'd play the horses.

And I don't find your argument characterizing lotteries as fraud persuasive in the slightest. People who buy lottery tickets are well aware they're chances of winning are pretty close to zero. Yes, they have to pay taxes if the do win, but that's not exactly an overriding concern.

At 1:1 I'd bet every dollar I have.

Where? Every country I'm aware of that dipped below replacement fertility has not been able to recover.

>Second, creating inflation is very beneficial when current inflation is below target.

That's not a blanket truth. Inflation is good if you don't have savings. It's bad if you do.

The next country? I'd bet good money against that proposition.

>It's not clear to me that the voting population has required significant convincing to stay 'tough on crime'.

That's the key. Ultimately it's the public which decides how tough sentencing is. People who are trying to blame shadowy capitalists or (laughably) libertarians are really barking up the wrong tree. We have a whole bunch of people in jail because the public wants them there.

Great. See how far you get when you ignore the majority's sensibilities in a democracy.

Oil is solar powered. If it didn't take so long to form we wouldn't be having the discussion at all.

I don't see why you would expect animals to evolve a way to "capture sunlight" (though some do: http://umich.uloop.com/news/view.php/77109/4-incredible-phot...) when it's far more efficient from the standpoint of the animal to eat plant matter.

You move in a circle of fools. For every person cheering the rioters there are ten people turned off to anything with which the rioters are associated.

If anything, the riots (along with the recent surge in violent crime) are going to end the nascent sentencing reform efforts that have been wending their way through Congress. We may have to wait another generation before we can try again.

>There is a such a strong anti-government 'libertarian' streak to US domestic policy, that is essentially anarchism though.

This is patent nonsense. "Anti-government" libertarian types (who aren't actually anti-government, by the way) have no interest in throwing masses of people in jail. Only 10% of the prison population is housed in a private prison - if the libertarians were in charge they'd all go broke.

No, the problem is the big government people who want to incarcerate everyone who spits on the sidewalk - the very antithesis of a libertarian.

1) It's not a tax. The IRS does not start sending you nasty letters if you don't play the lottery.

2) It's not fraud. Gambling is not fraud.

3) Yes, it would be illegal for you to set up your own lottery. But the state does a lot of things you would be arrested for doing, so that's not a very compelling argument.

Furthermore, a lot of people get genuine enjoyment out of playing the lottery. Who are you to say that's not worth the cost to the people who play?

>I think the idea is that if you legalize games of chance and have them run by the state, the rules are at least fair and there is some level of oversight that prevents people from being completely taken advantage of.

In California the mob "numbers racket" had a better payout (as a percentage of ticket sales) than the state lottery does.

>...finance was a crucial prop for profits in the two decades to 2007 (see chart 3), with the banking industry expanding rapidly and industrial firms such as GE and General Motors building huge shadow banks. The regulatory clampdown since the financial crisis means this adventure is now over.

Is it a regulatory clampdown, or is it just that the financial sector can only drive the rest of the economy to the extent it isn't already saturated with debt?