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Domus posted:If you have to ask if it's rigged, the answer is almost always "yes". I can't think of many exceptions...the state lotteries perhaps? If carnival games are rigged then lotteries and casinos are also rigged by the same definition. They're all specifically designed so they take in more money than they give out.
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Sep 4, 2019 20:23
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Carnival games are rigged in the sense that they employ deception to make it seem like the games are easier to win then they actually are. At least lotteries tell you the odds up front.
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Sep 4, 2019 21:00
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bamhand posted:If carnival games are rigged then lotteries and casinos are also rigged by the same definition. They're all specifically designed so they take in more money than they give out. I don’t know that’s true - lotteries and casinos are strictly regulated. It’s common knowledge that “the house always wins,” but they’re doing it according to a rule book that is public knowledge, if not law. Some guy bending the rims on his hoop game isn’t operating to any regulation or spec.
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Sep 4, 2019 21:09
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This is just me, but I'd welcome any analysis of the actual tricks or processes that anything from casinos to corporations to street-level conmen use to get people to do something that they otherwise wouldn't. IMO, casinos and lotteries are scams. You need your mind clouded at least a little to part with your money for these things, even if you "know" you won't win and you just do it for a mild "thrill." Great, now what? What are their mechanisms? How do they manage to avoid being popularly labeled as scams, or how do we as a culture offload the responsibility from them onto their victims? How do they leverage power structures to maintain their dominance, and how much are they like 'legitimate' businesses or religions? What's the truth of what's going on and how can we self-inoculate? I'm interested in stuff like that. I dunno, any good documentaries or anything? Reminds me, I need to find a copy of Randi's Flim-Flam!
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Sep 4, 2019 21:30
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Casinos are fun, but it's just paid entertainment. If you keep that in mind, casinos change from 'scam and rip off!' to 'drink with your friends for a few hours playing a game'. It's an expensive diversion, but the odds for every single game are easily looked up, same with the lotto. I used to go to the casino and have fun, you just pull out x amount of money and consider it the cost of the evening. If you walk out with part of it, or more, then bonus. Otherwise, that was your entertainment for the night.
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Sep 4, 2019 21:41
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Blue Moonlight posted:I don’t know that’s true - lotteries and casinos are strictly regulated. It’s common knowledge that “the house always wins,” but they’re doing it according to a rule book that is public knowledge, if not law. I mean you should just assume that anyone doing something as a business is doing it to make money and they wouldn't be doing it if they're losing money in the process. Then it becomes pretty obvious that the carnival games are designed to take in more than they're paying out, the mechanism in which they do it is irrelevant.
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Sep 4, 2019 21:45
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I came across someone, a while ago, who made a habit out of playing the state lottery. Of the sort of 'pick up a ticket once or twice a month, regularly, and see if they come out ahead' sort of deal, not as an addiction. I was curious and ended up learning a few neat things about it. State lotteries are a lot less rigged, or at least rigged fairly. At least out here, odds of winning have to be printed on the ticket, and more importantly, there's several websites which track winners in a given period. I don't have it on hand any more, but its printed in the lottery reciept. I think it might have been winners report? This is the thing that sets the state lottery apart: There's tools to see which lotteries have paid out - and which haven't - as well as what the base odds are. If you know where to look, its sort of like being able to go into the slot machine section and know which machines still have money on them. Its a small difference, but In my mind, this puts lottieries less into 'scam' and more 'transparently unfair'. Its overall made to make money for the state.
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Sep 4, 2019 21:53
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Captain Monkey posted:Casinos are fun, but it's just paid entertainment. If you keep that in mind, casinos change from 'scam and rip off!' to 'drink with your friends for a few hours playing a game'. It's an expensive diversion, but the odds for every single game are easily looked up, same with the lotto. I used to go to the casino and have fun, you just pull out x amount of money and consider it the cost of the evening. If you walk out with part of it, or more, then bonus. Otherwise, that was your entertainment for the night. Yeah this is 100% the mentality you have to have. My dad is really big into horse racing and we go as a family once a year for his birthday. Invariably he goes in with an attitude that he's going to win, ends up blowing more money than he planned to bet, and gets pissed off and depressed by the end of the night. Meanwhile my mom and I set aside x amount of dollars we plan to spend on the experience + food and drink, and budget our bets around that expecting to lose it all. If strike gold and come out winning more than you budgeted, that's great! If you just win a little bit, then hey you came in under budget! And if you lose every race, than whatever I spent $150 to hang out with my family for a day and drink, I've had way more expensive nights out that were less fun. Casinos are the same way. The trick too is to not re-invest your winnings into more gambling. If you come in with $200 and win on your first $10 bet, set it aside and play as if you only have $190 left.
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Sep 4, 2019 22:01
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TheParadigm posted:I came across someone, a while ago, who made a habit out of playing the state lottery. Of the sort of 'pick up a ticket once or twice a month, regularly, and see if they come out ahead' sort of deal, not as an addiction. make money for legislators, you mean my state legislature got bribed to pass a lottery bill, the news came out in the newspaper before they voted on it, and they still forced it through by calling a special session when one guy was in surgery and one guy was on his honeymoon so they could eke out a majority
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Sep 4, 2019 22:16
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doctorfrog posted:This is just me, but I'd welcome any analysis of the actual tricks or processes that anything from casinos to corporations to street-level conmen use to get people to do something that they otherwise wouldn't. For casinos, basically ensuring the odds always favor the house at 51-49%. After that, it's all about keeping people playing for as along as possible in order to ramp up the proceeds from those odds. They eliminate windows so you don't know what time it is, put the biggest winning slots near the front and do things like route traffic in ways similar to what grocery stores do to encourage more shopping and impulse buys. They give out free drinks to make people impulsive. Casinos in and of themselves aren't "scams" and to compare what they do to what carnival games do is off the mark.
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Sep 4, 2019 22:41
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Domus posted:If you have to ask if it's rigged, the answer is almost always "yes". I can't think of many exceptions...the state lotteries perhaps? State lotteries aren't "rigged" so much as "massively stacked in favor of the state." The odds are atrocious enough that they're definitely a scam especially when you look at scratchies. I think it's a federal law that they have to publish the odds so they aren't difficult to find but...ugh. Just go look at the odds. Seriously. Just look at the loving odds. You'd probably be more likely to make a profit on just lighting the money you'd spend on lottery tickets on fire then uploading the videos of it to YouTube.
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Sep 4, 2019 22:54
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BiggerBoat posted:For casinos, basically ensuring the odds always favor the house at 51-49%. After that, it's all about keeping people playing for as along as possible in order to ramp up the proceeds from those odds. These are the odds at optimal play, too. Keeping people drunk, sleep-deprived and disoriented improves that a bit I suspect. Then they make sure that big wins get noticed: lights, bells, special treatment... make sure everyone sees the big winner! There's the free perks you get for playing more too, anything to keep you at the table longer: I'll get a room upgrade if I just make it through this bad patch, OK well maybe a free buffet, etc. The average gambling budget for a trip to Vegas in 2016 was $578. I had $100 a day for my fun money and once it worked out great and once I went to bed early 3 nights in a row.
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Sep 4, 2019 23:03
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Sydin posted:Yeah this is 100% the mentality you have to have. My dad is really big into horse racing and we go as a family once a year for his birthday. Invariably he goes in with an attitude that he's going to win, ends up blowing more money than he planned to bet, and gets pissed off and depressed by the end of the night. Big time. This is why I find casinos really depressing - while I tend to stick to a small budget the few times I have gone, I talk to far too many people expecting to win big so they can pay off [x-y-z] bills and debts, only for them to wind up even further in a hole.
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Sep 4, 2019 23:22
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I just watched the John Oliver video and holy poo poo these people are just pulling basic EVE Online scams.
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Sep 4, 2019 23:22
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Tunicate posted:make money for legislators, you mean Yes and the biggest scam is "lottery money pays for education." So we have a ton of lotteries, casinos, and still we have a school levy every other year and my property tax keeps going up.
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Sep 5, 2019 12:46
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Cat Army
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MightyJoe36 posted:Yes and the biggest scam is "lottery money pays for education." So we have a ton of lotteries, casinos, and still we have a school levy every other year and my property tax keeps going up. your state may suck for some reason but lotteries often do pay for supplemental education on the state level beyond local control of school funding the basic idea of lotteries is that people are going to gamble anyway, so you may as well bring it into the open and tax it for public good rather than leaving it up to organized crime to take their profits. this is why alcohol and tobacco are legal and taxed, and is one of the big arguments in favor of legalizing marijuana. even in the mid 20th century illegal lotteries were popular, and one of the things that police vice squads would suppress along with drugs and prostitution was underground gambling the way that schools are funded in the united states takes place on a different level of government from the regulation of gambling and the distribution of proceeds. but states, assuming they are trying to reallocate the government's take of gambling earnings for public benefit, can often fund state-level programs. i live in a state where the lottery paid for my undergraduate degree, and currently pays for my child's pre-k schooling. i buy scratch off tickets every once in a while because as far as i'm concerned i've already won over $20k, which is what the state gave me to cover my tuition at a state university
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Sep 5, 2019 18:09
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I just think that anything that's essentially gambling needs to be marked as so with the odds. It would kill my former employer who did coin-op, but I hate that so much poo poo is "percentaged" but appears as skill. It may sound silly, but isn't it kinda scummy to run a claw machine without disclosing that it's impossible to win most of the time?
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Sep 5, 2019 18:32
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luxury handset posted:your state may suck for some reason but lotteries often do pay for supplemental education on the state level beyond local control of school funding money is fungible, it just reduces the amount the state provides through other sources,
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Sep 5, 2019 18:40
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luxury handset posted:your state may suck for some reason but lotteries often do pay for supplemental education on the state level beyond local control of school funding Wasn't there some post recently about how states were freely able to take from this fund, diverting lottery money from education to wherever they need it at the time? It was either lottery or property tax or both where someone was pointing out that the money often does not ultimately end up where it was designated for
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Sep 5, 2019 19:48
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Domus posted:isn't it kinda scummy to run a claw machine without disclosing that it's impossible to win most of the time?
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Sep 5, 2019 19:57
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BiggerBoat posted:For casinos, basically ensuring the odds always favor the house at 51-49%. After that, it's all about keeping people playing for as along as possible in order to ramp up the proceeds from those odds. They also tend to be very well lit so it always feels like daytime, have extremely soft and comfortable carpeting when you walk around, and it's very hard to actually see where exits are
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Sep 5, 2019 21:49
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In TN they started up a state lottery a while ago campaigning that "x millions will go into schools!" Which was technically correct, but what wasn't said is that previous school funding from other sources would be removed and lost to the ether (someone's pocket). I don't think something with published odds that sticks to it is a scam, but the bullshit they used to justify creating one certainly was.
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Sep 5, 2019 21:58
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Tunicate posted:money is fungible, it just reduces the amount the state provides through other sources, not really. pigovian taxes are a distinct funding source from bond issuance or sales tax or property tax or whatever Dumb Lowtax posted:Wasn't there some post recently about how states were freely able to take from this fund, there's fifty states so you're going to have to be more specific
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Sep 6, 2019 02:08
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luxury handset posted:not really. pigovian taxes are a distinct funding source from bond issuance or sales tax or property tax or whatever In actual fact, the amount of money going to education from the general fund was slashed, and - I stress this actually happened, and isn't a hypothetical - the percentage of the total state budget going to education has been reduced since the lottery was established. To cover their asses, the legislators made sure to strip out the 'lottery funds will only be used to supplement education, rather than substitute for other education funding sources' from the final version of the bill, so they sure as hell knew they were doing that. So yeah, you're regurgitating propaganda from a corrupt industry. Stop doing that.
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Sep 6, 2019 02:37
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So, to summarize, the common con/scam is representative democracy.
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Sep 6, 2019 02:49
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Tunicate posted:In actual fact, the amount of money going to education from the general fund was slashed, and - I stress this actually happened, and isn't a hypothetical - the percentage of the total state budget going to education has been reduced since the lottery was established. To cover their asses, the legislators made sure to strip out the 'lottery funds will only be used to supplement education, rather than substitute for other education funding sources' from the final version of the bill, so they sure as hell knew they were doing that. your state government  you seem to be blaming the concept of the lottery here when describing how elected officials in your state behaved dishonestly. there are many states, each works differently
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Sep 6, 2019 02:56
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luxury handset posted:your state government Sit, my child, and let me tell you a tale about Tammany Hall...
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Sep 6, 2019 02:59
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that's a universal consequence of "education" lottery spending across all states, dude. It happens with every education lottery, which makes them a very common type of scam.quote:Lotteries for Education: Windfall or Hoax? quote:Can students truly benefit from state lotteries: a look at lottery expenditures towards education in the American states quote:Earmarked Lottery Revenues for Education: A New Test of Fungibility quote:The Lottery and Education: Robbing Peter to Pay Paul?
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Sep 6, 2019 03:30
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did you google a bunch of paywalled academic articles without reading them? anyway here's the tldr of a more recent article https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brow...gher-education/ i get that you may be invested in winning this argument but i'm not quite sure you know what you're talking about so go ahead and take the last word if you want it
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Sep 6, 2019 03:49
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luxury handset posted:did you google a bunch of paywalled academic articles without reading them? a Don't be like that, dude. I even went to the additional trouble of posting excerpts from those articles for people who don't have journal access.
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Sep 6, 2019 04:22
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Tunicate posted:Don't be like that, dude. I even went to the additional trouble of posting excerpts from those articles for people who don't have journal access. Just spotted a scam right here in this thread! Observe how this poster has quoted the words of another poster. I, doing due diligence, took it upon myself to scroll up and double check. But upon arriving at the same post being quoted, found it to be altered, truncating the word "anyway" to "a"! Your scam almost fooled me, but clearly with no integrity to stand on you lose the argument about lotteries
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Sep 6, 2019 07:42
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An amusing thing about scratch-offs: A series of scratchers is printed in one batch with a set number of grand prize winners. Once all the grand prizes are won and claimed the state is free to sell the remaining tickets even though they cannot be winners. Arguably its "fair" since the initial odds remain the same but there's a good chance the "win 1 mil bux!!" tickets at your local gas station have a known 0% chance of winning.
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Sep 7, 2019 04:58
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Pekinduck posted:An amusing thing about scratch-offs: A series of scratchers is printed in one batch with a set number of grand prize winners. Once all the grand prizes are won and claimed the state is free to sell the remaining tickets even though they cannot be winners. Arguably its "fair" since the initial odds remain the same but there's a good chance the "win 1 mil bux!!" tickets at your local gas station have a known 0% chance of winning. If the state knows that there's no chance for people to win anymore prizes and is still selling tickets then they're lying and this is fraud.
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Sep 7, 2019 05:32
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Absurd Alhazred posted:If the state knows that there's no chance for people to win anymore prizes and is still selling tickets then they're lying and this is fraud. 
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Sep 7, 2019 05:34
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I don’t know if it’s a legal requirement, but this page exists for us - https://www.flalottery.com/remainingPrizes which is useful. I found a couple of $10 winners here that got put aside, but they have a time limit for claims which sucks.
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Sep 7, 2019 05:38
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Pekinduck posted:An amusing thing about scratch-offs: A series of scratchers is printed in one batch with a set number of grand prize winners. Once all the grand prizes are won and claimed the state is free to sell the remaining tickets even though they cannot be winners. Arguably its "fair" since the initial odds remain the same but there's a good chance the "win 1 mil bux!!" tickets at your local gas station have a known 0% chance of winning. I hate scratch off tickets and find it depressing watching people who I know don't have the money compulsively buying them all the time. It's a tax on desperation and stupidity and I see people all the time just standing around gas stations and queing back up line after scratching them all until they bust out. BUT, there is an app or a website or something that will actually tell you which ones have had how many winners and how many remain so technically you can increase your odds or avoid buying ones with no more winners left. EDIT BEATEN EL BROMANCE posted:I don’t know if it’s a legal requirement, but this page exists for us - Also, this breakdown: quote:For 2017-18, 52.0 percent will be distributed to school districts, 11.9 percent to 6 Page 11 the Florida College System, 13.1 percent to the state universities, 20.0 percent to Bright Futures and 3.0 percent to other student financial aid. of where Florida lottery money goes relating to schools surprised me since it actually adds up to 100%. I have a difficult time believing that.
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Sep 7, 2019 14:20
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For what it's worth I finally quit my first real job at a convenience store/gas station after 3 years because the day abruptly arrived when something clicked in my brain, like a key in a lock, and I realized with perfect clarity that I would never, ever, sell another lottery ticket as long as I live. I walked into the office and gave notice, spent two weeks calmly refusing to hear anything of being talked out of it, and fifteen years later I can still promise you that I will never, ever sell another lottery ticket as long as I live. It's real bad.
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Sep 7, 2019 14:39
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A few years ago, as a favor to a co-worker, I was involved in a panel held by the Georgia state lottery commission on how to improve the game. I did this twice a couple of years apart. There were about a dozen of us and we all basically agreed that scratch-offs were garbage. While we understood that not every ticket could be a winner, we all agreed that the smallest prize you should win should be the value of the purchase price. Paying $10 for a ticket and only winning a dollar somehow seemed worse than not winning anything at all. We were paid $50, was served lunch, and got 20 $1 tickets. I ended up winning about $75. The second time was $75, lunch, and the same tickets (I won about $40). I had only bought 5-10 tickets in the past and probably broke even.
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Sep 7, 2019 18:36
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My wife would pick some up every now and again, and we did win a $1,000 on a $10 card once. I never really put my own money on them more than a few times, so I like to think I’ve beaten the system overall.
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Sep 7, 2019 18:45
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I remember reading that most oldschool numbers rackets had better odds than state lotteries. Can’t find it with google though.
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Sep 7, 2019 19:48
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