which were written in an era when most of the gambling in the US was illegal and run by organized crime, Las Vegas was small, Atlantic City new, and New Hampshire the first state to get a lottery. Like prostitution, gambling needs a rather sophisticated criminal network, a parallel system of law-and-order, to be a workable, safe and reasonably fair business. Scarne started out his career, as a magician and card mechanic, as a sort of consultant who could keep games fair.
Blacks in New York City, for instance, ran illegal street craps and ran a lottery
quite similar to the "Pick 3" games you see in many states -- the latter got taken over by the Italian mafia.
Gambling has a broad cross-cultural appeal and some people are going to do it no matter how you try to shut it down. In the US we went from having a few centers to widespread "riverboat" and tribal gambling to widespread casinos now to mobile gambling on sports and sometimes the equivalent of video slots.
Of course there is the matter of degree. It's not going to wreck your life to drop $1 on the lottery a week and probably gives you more than $1 worth of fun. If you're addicted though it may be no fun at all. I can totally see where Nate Silver is coming from but I can also see the degenerate who drops 20 bets on a single game on the weekend as well as the person who thinks he is Nate Silver and he isn't. I think the Superbowl is a fair competition by player who are playing their hardest, but it breaks my heart as a sports fan when teams are not playing to win and that's why I can't stand watching the NBA despite loving going to second-tier college basketball games in person.
And for drugs? I remember all the Lester Grinspoon talk about how prohibition is worse than the drugs themselves and that might have been true before 2000 but in the Fentanyl age I see people dropping like flies all around me -- but Marshall McLuhan said we are driving by looking in the rear view mirror and of course some people are going to be repeating things that were true in the last century.
> but in the Fentanyl age I see people dropping like flies all around me
Fentanyl is a response to prohibition. If you have to smuggle something it's a lot easier to move 10 kg of fentanyl and cut it with something near the point of sale than to move 10,000 kg of codeine from the point of manufacture.
But then you have street dealers cutting it with who knows what in who knows what amount. They may use a 1000:1 ratio of unspecified hopefully-inert powder to fentanyl but don't mix it evenly so some customers get a 10000:1 ratio and others get 100:1 and become addicted or overdose. Or a dealer has one supplier who was already cutting it 50:1 so they were used to only cutting it another 20:1 so their customers don't complain, but then they start wanting larger quantities and find a new supplier without realizing they just bypassed the one who was pre-cutting it and are now getting uncut fentanyl.
None of that happens if anyone can buy codeine at Walmart. Or for that matter if they can buy fentanyl and know exactly how much they're getting.
> but in the Fentanyl age I see people dropping like flies all around me
Do you literally mean you are seeing people die around you? From doing drugs? What is your general location / occupation / lifestyle? I'm a 20+ year coder in the valley, and the closest I've come is hearing about some friends of my spouse (who is a teacher) who indulge in cannabis, and one couple who do adderall recreationally.
You must not leave the house. Emergency services responding to ODs is commonplace in SF. It happened at least once per week outside my office. Walgreens (while they were still open) ran audio ads in the store encouraging you to buy narcan.
It's a running gag in our house that fried snacks from Asia at places like 人's Market have Prop 65 warning stickers because of a high level of Acrylamide.
The thing is that it is not a strange technological ingredient but instead a byproduct of ordinary cooking techniques as well as the production of ultra-processed foods. It will never go away but you can set limits for it and you can modify methods of production to produce less.
Growing up in the 1980s Japanese animation seemed to come out of a much larger cultural matrix: I was excited by Space Battleship Yamato and felt moe for the first time when I saw a pin-up of Lum from Urusei Yatsura and my intuitive understanding of that expanded universe turned out to be right: a written culture that started a bit before the year 1000 when Chinese scholars helped Japanese learn to write down their own legends and myths and brought along a wealth of Chinese and Indian literature and then another flowering when Japan opened up to the west and became the first culture outside the west to attempt to beat us at our own game.
It certainly looks as if it has negotiated a different configuration of the balance between individualism and community. In the US people seem to think you are a bad person if you want life to be cozy. On the other hand, I don't think they'd let me ride the bus as-a-fox in Japan. The police have a ludicrously high conviction rate and we don't know if it because if is they are too tough (torture suspects, in cahoots with the judge) or too lax (don't press charges unless they know if they can win)
Even though nonconformists don't seem to be accepted there, the culture industry proves that they must exist. Here on the other hand I increasingly feel frustrated that our vast inventory of fantasy and science fiction literature (Fred Pohl, Pohl Anderson, Piers Anthony, Alfred Bester, Vernor Vinge, ...) doesn't get visual adaptations but our gatekeeping-industrial complex has never seen a sequel it didn't like (Dune, Dune, Dune, Dune, ...) In Japan on the other hand somebody can make a web novel and then a light novel and then there is a manga and a terribly flawed anime that gets me back to the source material... and I'm hooked!
I don't know if I will ever go. I will never go to Akihabara, I've been there in so many video games that I have a vivid image in all my senses including a feel of how many steps it is up to the elevated platform across to the train station. It's probably all wrong but I wouldn't want to let the real thing ruin the Akiba in my mind.
USians being proud of their nonconformism is like PG or Elon taking pride in their (children's) (meta)cognitive abilities (or HN talking its curiosity book)
The more sophisticated equilibrium to compare with the Japanese is the Swiss: it seems that the reason Swiss max(quirkiness) is significantly less that JP's is that CH has been optimising for skepticism of Karens ("pride" is maybe the key metric to look at, if we care to do a 3-agent strong-link weak-link analysis)
As SF (city and literary genre) become less like the frontier, the individual-community tradeoff is going to look more like the Dutch-- all the commercialised quirkiness does is make you groan, the way rbanffy's kids make him (if he has any)!
Btw, 2-way Protecting Power Mandate is a terrestrial image of the Mandate of Heaven, imho
That's it? Just 3 companies? Out of which one is a state propped defense provider, and the other won from purchasing US tech. IDK how you can see that as a win for the world's richest block.
For one thing there is the nightmare scenario that the guy who shows up for the job interview is the front man for a North Korean team. Also the Bay Area is like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave... but much worse and they’d hate more than anything if you “think different”
On the other hand I've worked in offices with nightmare scenarios where employees showed agitated and with firearms, or had people come looking for employees due to outside personal conflicts
which was a lot better than other products on the market and solved difficult problems like CAPTCHAs and email verification links and was famous for a "conversational" advertising campaign which generated results like
"Remember, there are no technological solutions to social problems."
is something I want to counterpoint with "there are no social solutions to technological problems", like how the looming situation pointed out by the Club of Rome in 1973
would be difficult enough to solve in a socially cohesive society run by philosopher kings. Practically you have a choice between democracies which have a 0 probability of being adequate to the task (against the axioms of political science: it's like a perpetual motion machine which violates the first and second laws of thermodynamics and then the old professor chimes in and says it must violate the third too) and autocracies which might get lucky 10⁻¹² of the time; even if the tech fix [1] has a 10⁻³ chance of successfully kicking the can down the road I'd take that chance.
[1] say: liquid salt (not metal) fast breeder reactor with a supercritical CO2 powerset
Yeah, I’ve heard that there is some very axiomatic math to being anti-democratic for some reason. Unlike the mathematically sound benevolent and also omniscient philosopher kings.
makes it clear you need expert decision making and democratic participation and without them no system is sustainable. Yet these can't really be reconciled: the public often doesn't know enough to have a worthwhile opinion.
The last defense of democracy is Winston Churchill's "democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried." What it promises is that you can depose bad leaders in an orderly way, not have good leadership. But today it fails to do even that and people are craving good leadership. In the US today it is not "make the trains run on time" but it is having trains at all -- so Xi's China can look a little appealing to some people, even myself on a bad day although I know better.
The argument that Trump represents a threat to democracy doesn't motivate most people in the US because our democracy lacks output legitimacy, whether it is really bad as people think it is an open question in my mind (I'm lucky enough to be a homeowner) but you just can't sell people on it -- the Schoolhouse Rock song and dance about How a bill becomes a law looks like tangled-up proceduralism and the last scene in the The Parallax View where a murdered politician careens on a golf cart through tables on the floor of a conference center is more how it feels
It's easy to say that the path to Eudaimonia today would involve ignoring politics but Nader and Pericles would agree that "If you're not turned on to politics, then politics will turn on you"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Scarne
which were written in an era when most of the gambling in the US was illegal and run by organized crime, Las Vegas was small, Atlantic City new, and New Hampshire the first state to get a lottery. Like prostitution, gambling needs a rather sophisticated criminal network, a parallel system of law-and-order, to be a workable, safe and reasonably fair business. Scarne started out his career, as a magician and card mechanic, as a sort of consultant who could keep games fair.
Blacks in New York City, for instance, ran illegal street craps and ran a lottery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_game
quite similar to the "Pick 3" games you see in many states -- the latter got taken over by the Italian mafia.
Gambling has a broad cross-cultural appeal and some people are going to do it no matter how you try to shut it down. In the US we went from having a few centers to widespread "riverboat" and tribal gambling to widespread casinos now to mobile gambling on sports and sometimes the equivalent of video slots.
Of course there is the matter of degree. It's not going to wreck your life to drop $1 on the lottery a week and probably gives you more than $1 worth of fun. If you're addicted though it may be no fun at all. I can totally see where Nate Silver is coming from but I can also see the degenerate who drops 20 bets on a single game on the weekend as well as the person who thinks he is Nate Silver and he isn't. I think the Superbowl is a fair competition by player who are playing their hardest, but it breaks my heart as a sports fan when teams are not playing to win and that's why I can't stand watching the NBA despite loving going to second-tier college basketball games in person.
And for drugs? I remember all the Lester Grinspoon talk about how prohibition is worse than the drugs themselves and that might have been true before 2000 but in the Fentanyl age I see people dropping like flies all around me -- but Marshall McLuhan said we are driving by looking in the rear view mirror and of course some people are going to be repeating things that were true in the last century.
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