Playing the lottery must be an action that has a negative expected value (otherwise they’d go out of business). But if, rather than expected value, you are optimizing for “probability of having a hundred million dollars” or whatever, your options are: keep the money you would have spent on the ticket (0% chance of success) or buy the ticket (very small chance of success).
So, I can see why people go for it. Especially if the ticket cost won’t make an actual difference to their life circumstances, and the winning money would.
But what I can't stand is the self perceived moral superiority of people who are like "haha, lottery is for idiots!"
I go to Vegas and gamble sometimes, which is not all that different. I don't gamble because I expect to win money; I gamble because the experience (especially with more social games like craps) is fun to me, even when I lose. Certainly it's not fun to everyone, but roller coasters aren't fun to everyone either, and that's fine.
If you only gamble or play the lottery because you genuinely think you have a reasonable shot of coming out ahead (vs. other uses for that money), then you may have a problem. Or if you have an addiction to gambling and it's actually hurting your finances.
The other bit is that if you're poor, and playing the lottery is a way for you to build a little hope into your life (even if, deep down, you know you're unlikely to win), that's... questionable, maybe? Not an indictment of yourself, but it calls into question societal structures that essentially profit off your low-level financial despair, in return for lessening that despair a little, but only with a placebo. When instead society should instead be helping you, to, y'know, not be poor.
But hey, if someone allocates $5 in their budget to buy scratch-offs every day, I'd say that's probably better for their health than eating a $5 ice cream sundae every day.
I may have simply misread the GP and picked the wrong meaning, but I was going with this definition https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/whitewashing-words-...
Again, this is why I asked how it was the race-based version of whitewashing rather than immediately going into a debate. I wanted to clarify my understanding and see if I missed anything before jumping down someone's throat, would have been nice to get the same courtesy here.
I fail so see how providing you with the correct meaning is "jumping down your throat".
What happens when you have $5, but you win the scratchcard, and now you have $10?
A person buying ice cream every day, probably isn't going to want to be buy 2 on the same day. Can the same be said for lotto patrons?
Arguably, they'd be better off having had 3X the entertainment for their dollar.
Plus... Building a PiHole was downright fun and easy.
But at least it only takes 30 seconds to install ublock origin, and no extra hardware.
Just plug whatever ISP router directly into your own, more capable, router and your home network will look identical, no matter where you move to or how many times you change ISP.
That said, running Pi-hole on a Raspberry pi is a treat!
The Unifi line solves this, and while it has some rough edges, it is so great. 9/10.
And like the other poster my gateway didn’t work with a a pihole so I had to change each clients’ DNS (which reverting for the housemate was a solution).
It was worth it but ultimately I needed more than just a pihole, sideloading my iPhone every week with custom YouTube apps, trying to find a custom twitch app to sideload, having to use Yewtu.be on mobile, etc. None of the apps like Adguard blocked ads in other apps well enough from what I experienced.
Obviously you can also use an ad blocker, but I think DuckDuckGo deserves more credit for making it a first-party option.
So, I guess it is not just a tax on the poor and stupid. Everyone has to pay, company A buys ads, company B burns an equally large pile of money to cancel it out, and we’re just back where we started.
Your attention is valuable. Your data, your preferences, your identity--these are valuable. (They may be the only thing about humans that, economically, is.)
When you see an ad, your brain deploys coping mechanisms [1]. The tax isn't paid with money, but with time and neurology.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363287602_Coping_wi...
Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on ads.
My point isn't that my paycheck doesn't come from ads or that I've washed my hands from that dirty ad business. What I meant was that I don't really have internal knowledge about ads, I'm not an authority, and also I don't speak for Google's ad business.
However, after I posted my comment I realized my statement, while true literally, was misleading, because I did intern in ads in 2015, which I had forgotten about when I posted my previous comment. So I'm sorry for that mistake.
With ads the big company gets 99% of the mindshare and the small one gets 1%.
Encourage you to try it. I've repeated Scott Galloway's mantra that advertisement is a tax on America's poor and stupid. But I never quite clocked the cost of search ads. It might be solely due to that lack of scrolling through crud that makes Kagi seem much, much faster than Google or DuckDuckGo.