> The cruelty is indeed the point

What's the difference between this and just outright saying that enforcing the law is cruelty? After all, nobody enjoys being punished, even if it's for breaking the law.

I don't want people to be unlawfully present in my country. Enough people desired that same outcome that, through the democratic process, we have laws controlling immigration. There has to be consequences for breaking that law. It absolutely cannot be the case that anyone can break the law and then have it not matter on the grounds that to make it matter would be cruel. What even is the point of the rule of law?

To expand, there are two major problems with nonprofits in Western nations these days:

1. Governments use them as a way to do things that they themselves are not allowed to do ("it's private charities that do this!", ignoring the fact that the charities get >90% of their revenue from government grants)

2. Like you mentioned, the government grants to nonprofit back to politicians' campaign funds pipeline. Utterly egregious.

> Obama even expanded the rules in the US to allow the government to unconstitutionally fund religious groups to accomplish functions that belong in government

I wasn't aware of this being a big concern; more the other way around, like in my point 1.

Besides, it's probably counterproductive in the long run to think of strong worker rights as being opposed to the employer wanting higher productivity out of the worker.

What do you call Manhattan? It would count among the ~10 most dense cities proper in the world.

No, I'm saying that there are reasons why some people stay poor. My further implication is that it isn't for the most part because society is keeping them down.

> Your investment math also seems pretty far off. Those numbers appear to assume a 15% return from the S&P 500, a number I’ve never heard a financial advisor recommend.

It was based on an initial $100 investment followed by a monthly $200 investment into the S&P 500 (as an alternative destination for the $2500/year claimed by that study that some high spenders put that much into the lottery) applied over the actual past 10 years of performance[0].

Prudent financial advisors would of course tell you not to count on 15% CAGR forever, but my example was based on real results that anyone could have obtained by consistently buying boring index funds instead of lottery tickets! There's no trickery here.

> that means there are a lot of poor non-ticket-buying households in order for the numbers to work out. Why are those people poor?

In discussions about the poor, we all should distinguish between those who happen to be poor at any given moment, and those who are poor their whole lives, or even over generations. My comments about the character traits of the poor only apply to the latter.

[0]: https://testfol.io/

Being clever and lazy forces you to determine what should not be done, as opposed to just doing everything because you can because you're clever and industrious.

As you climb higher and higher in decision-making, it becomes clear that the things you say no to at some point becomes more important than the things you say yes to.

I agree with you, but perhaps from the other direction. I think American society in particular gives an amazing amount of opportunity for people to climb out of poverty, or at least we used to, before we started "replacing what works with what sounded good". But we still do, for the most part.

Most of the cultural and social factors that prevent someone from lifting themselves up are self-imposed by those individual cultures and societies, and as of late, it's become verboten to call them out on it. There exist subgroups in this country where you'd indeed have to be a truly remarkable individual to claw yourself out of it into wealth. However, it doesn't have to be that way; that's a choice society made, on what grounds exactly I'm not sure, but the choice was made nevertheless.

On that same vein, there is no particular evidence needed to convince someone that people who share the characteristics with me of not being very tall or particularly athletic have a terribly poor chance of making it in the NBA.

But here is one study[0] which found, interestingly, that although a higher time preference (that is, preferring the present over the future) is correlated as expected with wealth, it is not significantly correlated with current income. Put another way: in the modern world where opportunities are varied, anyone, even people with poor impulse control and high time preference, could earn high incomes, but you only become wealthy (i.e. escape poverty) over time through putting aside some of that income to save and invest.

Back to the American setting, "heavy hitters" of the lottery spend about $2500/yr[1]. If you instead put $200/mo into the S&P 500 over ten years, you'd be sitting on over $55k. Time under the curve matters greatly. The same personality traits that make someone prefer buying scratchers instead of investing for their future are the ones that keep them poor. I would have thought this to be self-evident.

[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7392281/

[1]: https://elmwealth.com/lottery-fallacy/

[0]: If we're splitting hairs, we should specify that having poor impulse control and higher time preference are the base causational factors that make it more likely for someone to be poor, buy lottery tickets, engage in criminality, etc. etc.

I think gambling is almost a natural instinct in humans, and a state-run lottery may be a relief valve for that itch to be scratched in a controlled manner.

America is the land of the free, but I think there have been and will continue to be reasonable disagreements on the question of, free to do what? It's evident that "freedom" isn't a pure, unrestricted thing in the anarchist sense. We all agree that through the democratic process, laws can be made to declare some things not free to be done.

And to the degree that various taxpayer-funded social programs exist, the cost of grown consenting adults destroying their own lives are directly borne by the rest of us.

> but outright banning prediction markets and casinos is definitely not the right one

In general, I think a gradual "ban" in the form of taxation is often times better, especially for things that society is trying to discourage out of its sinful or destructive nature; think cigarettes.

> Milk, eggs, flour, flowers, microfiber towels, batteries, salt and pepper

If you can walk out of Costco month after month with just those essentials, and never pick up any of the nice-looking and reasonably-priced goodies there, I think it's safe to say that you have the level of discipline required to be financially successful and not have to care about whether you're getting the best price per unit of whatever it is you're buying. :-)

There's a large overlap between people who cannot "afford" to shop at Costco and people who spend hundreds of dollars a month on scratch-offs. Whether or not someone shops at Costco is mostly a function of preferences and behavioral choices, not dollars.

The former is just maintenance of basic civic standards.

> piles of research showing that severity of punishment is not an effective deterrent

> not think of consequences

> Deterrence means a lot less when you don't have to worry about recidivism because the person is dead

Sounds like (in general, not talking about minors) when you execute the people who for whatever reason cannot think far enough ahead for punishment to be an effective deterrent, you eventually will be left with people who are able to do that, who will comprise a less criminal society.

The United States has a very well-developed social safety net, despite what Reddit likes to claim. It spends a ton of money making sure the poor are fed, housed, and clothed. There exist literal generations of people who have lived on the public dole.

Such people are not arrested for not having money, but instead for being a pox upon the public by virtue of their behavior.

I guess it depends on your definition of "handwritten"; they're actually robotically written, so no actual human hands are involved.