Interesting Facts, Thoughts, and Ideas

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The majority of lottery tickets are purchased by the lowest-income Americans. Why?

The lowest-income Americans overestimate their odds of winning because when you feel trapped in poverty-stricken stagnation you desperately need to believe that you can buy a ticket out of your situation in order to maintain a certain level of functioning optimism.

A lot of decisions are statistically wrong but support the incentives of the person making them – a good thing to remember when analyzing the predictions you use to justify your own actions.

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The lowest-income households in the U.S. on average spend $412 annually on lottery tickets, which is nearly four times the $105 a year spent by the highest-earning households. Four hundred bucks is the same amount of money that 40% of households cannot come up with in a pinch. Low-income Americans are blowing their emergency funds on a 1-in-300 million flier.

[chuckz28]

Honestly some people are better at collecting money than others just as in everything else. There is a real story about a school bus driver retiring a millionaire in the book "The Millionaire Mind".

Even on low income if you live below your means you can build wealth. The type of people that buy lottery tickets instead of saving and investing either don't know what to do, or just aren't good with doing what it takes.

Usually most people already know the common sense answer on what they NEED to do but end up trying to keep up with the Joneses falling for advertising and such so they buy a bunch of shit they don't need.

You could literally give every single person the same money each month and always end up with wealth disparity because of this. This is why a lot of lottery winners go bankrupt. This is also the fault of socialism.

[Bouncer]

Honestly some people are better at collecting money than others just as in everything else. There is a real story about a school bus driver retiring a millionaire in the book "The Millionaire Mind".

Even on low income if you live below your means you can build wealth. The type of people that buy lottery tickets instead of saving and investing either don't know what to do, or just aren't good with doing what it takes.

Usually most people already know the common sense answer on what they NEED to do but end up trying to keep up with the Joneses falling for advertising and such so they buy a bunch of shit they don't need.

You could literally give every single person the same money each month and always end up with wealth disparity because of this. This is why a lot of lottery winners go bankrupt. This is also the fault of socialism.

agree totally. well said

[Bouncer]

Astronaut Scott Kelly’s genes are no longer identical to those of his identical twin after spending a year in space. Preliminary results from NASA’s Twins Study found that seven percent of Kelly’s genes no longer match those of his twin, Mark. Scott Kelly spent one year aboard the International Space Station during the study, while his brother remained on Earth.

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Even when people know the correct information, they often fail to notice errors and will even go on to use that incorrect information in other situations.

Research from cognitive psychology shows that people are naturally poor fact-checkers and it is very difficult for us to compare things we read or hear to what we already know about a topic. In what’s been called an era of “fake news,” this reality has important implications for how people consume journalism, social media and other public information.

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The definition of “rich” is passive income that’s greater than your burn. My dad and his wife receive about $50K/year from dividends, pension, and Social Security, and spend $40K/year. They are rich. I have a number of friends who earn between $1M and $3M, and with several children in Manhattan private schools, an ex-wife, a home in the Hamptons, and lifestyle fitting of a Master of the Universe, they spend most, if not all of it. They are poor.

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“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

-Richard Feynman

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This surprised me:
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It’s about 50 percent cheaper to raise hogs in North Carolina than in China. This is due to less-expensive pig-feed prices and larger farms, but it’s also because of loose business and environmental regulations, especially in red states, which have made the U.S. an increasingly attractive place for foreign companies to offshore costly and harmful business practices.

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Numbers say crime is falling, but that often doesn’t include modern forms of crime:

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To many criminologists, academics and law enforcement leaders, crimes like car theft are anachronisms in a modern era in which the internet’s virtual superhighways have supplanted brick-and-mortar streets as the scenes for muggings, prostitution rings or commercial burglaries. They see dips in traditional violence and larceny as offset by a twin phenomenon: A surge in the evolving crimes of the digital era, and the fact that they are not fully captured in law enforcement’s reporting systems.

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According to Amazon, four fifths of Prime members who signed up for the service a month after it launched in 2005 are still with the company.

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Many businesses do not fail fast– rather they just never really succeed:

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14 percent of hires at Google have no college degree, according to the company’s senior human-resources officer. Nearly half of Americans surveyed last year by Public Agenda — a nonpartisan policy organization that focuses on education and other topics — said a higher education is no longer necessarily a good investment. And about the same proportion of graduates in a Gallup poll released last year said they were less than certain their degrees were worth the money. Food for thought.

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Knowledge:

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Those who were most opposed to genetically modified foods believed they were the most knowledgeable about this issue, yet scored the lowest on actual tests of scientific knowledge.

In other words, those with the least understanding of science had the most science-opposed views, but thought they knew the most.

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There are no conservative meteorologists or liberal geologists, but we happily accept the equivalent in economics and sociology.