{"id":252769,"date":"2022-10-28T15:19:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-28T15:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=252769"},"modified":"2022-10-28T15:19:00","modified_gmt":"2022-10-28T15:19:00","slug":"what-weve-lost-as-a-result-of-our-addiction-to-lotteries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2022\/10\/28\/what-weve-lost-as-a-result-of-our-addiction-to-lotteries\/","title":{"rendered":"What we’ve lost as a result of our addiction to lotteries"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Note<\/strong>: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can\u00a0see other issues\u00a0and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One in two American adults buys a lottery ticket at least once a year, one in four buys one at least once a month, and the most avid players buy them at rates that might shock you. Some customers snap up entire rolls, three hundred dollars\u2019 worth of tickets, and others show up in the morning, play until they win something, then come back in the evening and do it again. All of this, repeated every day at grocery stores and liquor stores and mini-marts across the country, renders the lottery a ninety-one-billion-dollar business<\/a>. \u201cAmericans spend more on lottery tickets every year than on cigarettes, coffee, or smartphones,\u201d Cohen writes, \u201cand they spend more on lottery tickets annually than on video streaming services, concert tickets, books, and movie tickets combined.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A top female gamer talks about the sexism in the industry<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Stevie \u201cKillCreek\u201d Case\u2019s dominance in first-person shooters made her gaming\u2019s first female superstar. Her conquest and sharpshooting skills scored her a sponsorship as the industry\u2019s first professional female gamer<\/a>. After beating legendary Quake developer John Romero at his own game, she started dating him, and became the Pamela Anderson to his Tommy Lee \u2013 they were influencers long before the advent of social media. Today, Case is a successful 46-year-old single mother and Silicon Valley executive. Two decades after she left the gaming industry with no explanation, she\u2019s breaking her silence about the abuse she suffered during her KillCreek years because she says that little has changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Inside a massive abandoned town of Disney-esque castles<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If Disney World is the happiest place on Earth, then Burj Al Babas might be the eeriest. Sitting near the Black Sea, the town is full of half-finished, fully abandoned mini-castles, 587 to be exact. Like most ghost towns, it wasn\u2019t supposed to be this way. Burj Al Babas was planned as a luxurious, stately urban development offering the look of royal living<\/a> for anyone willing to shell out $600,000 for their own little palace. It made so much sense: Rich foreigners uninterested in the south of France or the northeastern tip of Spain could enjoy the Mediterranean climate on Gothic-style rooftop terraces overlooking the lush Turkish forest, with underfloor heating and Jacuzzis on every level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Brightest ever space explosion reveals possible hints of dark matter<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The explosion was a long gamma-ray burst, a cosmic event where a massive dying star unleashes powerful jets of energy as it collapses into a black hole or neutron star. This particular burst was so bright that it oversaturate<\/a>d the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, an orbiting NASA telescope designed in part to observe such events. \u201cThere were so many photons per second that they couldn\u2019t keep up,\u201d said Andrew Levan, an astrophysicist at Radboud University in the Netherlands. The burst even appears to have caused Earth\u2019s ionosphere, the upper layer of Earth\u2019s atmosphere, to swell in size. \u201cThe fact you can change Earth\u2019s ionosphere from an object halfway across the universe is pretty incredible,\u201d said Doug Welch, an astronomer at McMaster University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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She was given a house \u2013 but it already belonged to a Detroit family<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Anne Moore writes that in 2016, she was given a house by Write a House, a short-lived Detroit-based organization founded in 2011 to award homes to low-income scribes. The gift was meant to support writers with some of the city\u2019s plentiful housing stock \u2013 and thus change the stories that get told about Detroit. “It was, on paper, a great idea. But the house I was given already belonged to someone<\/a>: Tomeka Langford. I didn\u2019t know it at the time. Neither did Tomeka,” Moore says. “After the roof was replaced, I realized I was now living in a surprisingly expensive free house, trying to fulfill the mission of an organization that no longer existed. It was frustrating and unsustainable.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What happens when you hit a moose with your car in Alaska<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ted Genoways was driving through Alaska at night when a full-grown cow moose vaulted from the brush on the right shoulder and into the road. “For a moment, she was frozen there, flat and depthless in my headlights. Without thinking, I slammed on the horn as I pressed the brakes almost to the floor, but the car didn\u2019t seem to slow. I heard the clump of limbs against the grill and then the hood, then a whine\u2014almost wheeze\u2014from the moose as she went through the windshield. She passed so far through the glass that I actually felt her fur against my face<\/a>.\u201d As the car skidded to a stop, the roof collapsed under her weight. Only later would I realize that I\u2019d come inches from death.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Watch this train in Azerbaijan cross a seven-lane highway<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The strange story of this unusual train line in Baku, Azerbaijan, crossing a 7 lane motorway

[video, explanation: https:\/\/t.co\/2gkT3PFodu<\/a>]pic.twitter.com\/Zn3Gq9NVmD<\/a><\/p>— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 24, 2022<\/a><\/blockquote>