{"id":905,"date":"2008-03-28T09:26:03","date_gmt":"2008-03-28T13:26:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/03\/28\/now-thats-just-mean\/"},"modified":"2008-03-28T09:26:03","modified_gmt":"2008-03-28T13:26:03","slug":"now-thats-just-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/03\/28\/now-thats-just-mean\/","title":{"rendered":"Now That&#8217;s Just Mean"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the life sim Kudos, your perpetually broke tosser had the option to buy a lottery ticket. My characters rarely had enough scratch to do it, but every now and then they&#8217;d drop a few bucks on the ticket. I didn&#8217;t expect game breaking piles of money, but an extra fifty pounds here or there would have made a huge difference.<\/p>\n<p>Now comes the news from Positech&#8217;s developer Cliff Harris that <a href=\"http:\/\/cliffski.blogspot.com\/2008\/03\/warning-do-not-attempt-social.html\">I shouldn&#8217;t have bothered<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>THE LOTTERY TICKET IS A WASTE OF MONEY.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It was a joke I put in. There is NO chance of winning. There is no code for it. It is deliberate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s intended to be a commentary on how lotteries exploit those who can least afford it by trafficking in dreams instead of hard work.<\/p>\n<p>One of my mentors in graduate school opened his lectures on the economic model of rational decision making with a discussion of lotteries. He would break down the cost and likelihood of benefit to demonstrate that that one dollar ticket is probably best spent on coffee or something else.<\/p>\n<p>Given his optimistic nature, I always suspected that he bought tickets when nobody was looking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the life sim Kudos, your perpetually broke tosser had the option to buy a lottery ticket. My characters rarely had enough scratch to do it, but every now and then they&#8217;d drop a few bucks on the ticket. I didn&#8217;t expect game breaking piles of money, but an extra fifty pounds here or there [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-eB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}