If You’ve Got the Money, Honey, I’ve Got The Time

I think we all go through our lives with certain basic beliefs about the world. Call them perspectives or hypotheses or attitudes, or whatever. I have my own, formed partly from what I read (and I do read a lot) and partly from what I see around me as I go about my days. My hypotheses about the world have changed over time, I think because the world has changed, but there is no denying that I have changed, also.

One of my key current hypotheses is that the world – let’s say North America – is populated by too many people who have too much time and/or too much money to spend. Put differently, they are in a position to spend time and money on things that seem to me – well, nutso.

Readers know that I like watching sports, and I like listening to live music even more. In my day I went to a lot of concerts by talented performers. The Stones, Blue Rodeo, Allison Krause, the Hip, Guess Who, Steely Dan, Chris Isaak, REM, the list is long.

However, these days going to a concert by a first-tier performer is eye-wateringly expensive. A website called The Pricer gives the following info as of October of 2024 for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour of that year.

Taylor Swift’s average ticket prices range from $400 on the low end to over $3,500 for the best floor seats via primary sales.

The same article noted that

According to an article on Fortune, the average ticket prices for her U.S. tour range between $2,000 and $8,500 on the resale market.

That ‘resale market’ is important, as that is how a vast majority of people obtain their tickets to big-name concerts these days. (I’m no fan of Ms Swift, but her prices are only one example; I am not picking on her.)

As a contrast, I saw The Stones in 1998 at Aloha Stadium in Honolulu. Long time ago, yes, but that means they were still an ass-kicking band, and the price on the ticket (which I still have) is $US65. Reserved seats, great view, great sound.

Bigtime sporting events are similar. According to the NY Post, writing at a  in time when the two teams for the 2025 World Series were set:

At the time of publication, the lowest price we could find on tickets for any one game in Toronto was $1,244 USD including fees on Vivid Seats.

Prices start at $755 including fees for games in La La Land.

Here is a quote from a recent Globe article about the World Cup, coming soon to North America:

On FIFA’s own resale marketplace, a ticket for the final was being listed for as much as US$230,000 this week. FIFA does not resell tickets or set prices on the platform, but can cash in for a second time by taking a 30-per-cent cut from any sale.

30% of those prices adds up to a chunk of change, eh FIFA?

FIFA is among the most corrupt organizations on planet Earth, but those prices are at those levels only because there are schmoes in North America willing to pay them. Hence, my hypothesis.

One must have a lot of ‘spare’ income and time to attend the World Cup, the World Series, or a Taylor Swift concert. But this article was actually inspired by my coming across some more mundane illustrations of my basic hypothesis.

Here they are:

Poop Monitoring

I was reading an article in The Free Press, as I do, and it referred to something called Throne.

I went and looked it up on the interweb thing, and here is a quote direct from the top of their website:

Throne is a smart, toilet-mounted sensor that turns everyday bathroom moments into personalized gut, hydration and urinary insights — no manual tracking, no food logging, no routine changes.

That last bit would be clearer if they had written ‘no changes in your routine’, but – you get the picture.

This is a sensor you put on your toilet, and it – well, it checks your poo every time you go.

Why?

Well, as the website says:

Stop guessing.
Start understanding your body.

Who does not want to understand their body, after all?

More quotes from the site – I really do love the way they put things:

Automatic, hands-free detection turns bathroom moments into health signals you can use the same day.

The ‘hands-free’ bit is definitely important.

Then there is this:

Gut Health, Hydration, Bathroom Habits and Urinary Function scores make patterns easy to see and easier to act on.

I can just see myself checking my scores every day……

I know, some of you degenerates reading this are thinking…..Hey, but…..

The Throne people are on to you. The site also says this:

What the sensor actually sees

Throne’s optical sensor faces downward into the bowl. It is physically incapable of recording the person using the toilet.
Additionally, each frame passes through privacy filters that automatically delete anything that could contain human anatomy.

No, you cannot capture photos of your guests’ jolly bits on your iphone, folks. Sorry.

And….for those worried about their own privacy, well:

How we protect your data

Your data is encrypted with bank-level security.

• • Use the toilet as usual, just bring your phone!

  • Throne uploads your TLS 1.2 encrypted session data to the cloud for analysis.

  • Throne’s AI turns raw session data into health insights. These are protected with AES-256 encryption.

  • Your health insights are securely sent to your phone via the Throne app.

Obviously, if it’s TLS 1.2  and AES-256 encrypted, nothing could go wrong. And – poo data being analyzed in the cloud. Now that is an image.

Not surprisingly, the most prominent thing on the Throne site is a Shop Now button. It’s everywhere. I clicked on one, and am happy to inform you that Throne One can be had for only $399.99.

US dollars, I’m afraid, and I expect there is some Shipping and Handling added once you get down to ordering. Cheap, though, compared to a Taylor Swift or World Cup ticket, and it will provide months, if not years, of happy poo-gazing.

You may of course be wondering if you should not wait a bit for Throne 2.0. Tough call.

Beating the Odds

For this next one, I will admit I am not sure it really illustrates a society full of people with too much income or one with too little smarts. However, I am mindful of the adage that a lot of people have more money than smarts, and this is surely an illustration of that.

To give credit, I was pointed at this modern wonder by the fine folks at Gelman’s statistics blog. As you will see, it is not surprising that a bunch of practicing statisticians had something to say about Lotto Champ.

Statisticians, as well as most reasonable folks, take the view that the outcome of a State or Provincial lottery is random. However, it should be admitted that what exactly it means for some process to be ‘random’ is murky. One might want to say that it means it is unpredictable, but the weather two weeks from now is quite impossible to predict (despite what your local forecaster claims), but it is the result of deterministic natural processes. It’s just that the processes are so complex that we have no hope of predicting them. So, things can be unpredictable that are not really random, but if something is truly random, then it is certainly unpredictable.

I play online solitaire, in which the deal of the cards is said to be ‘random’, but they are in fact the output of some kind of carefully constructed computer algorithm. I can’t predict them, but I don’t think the cards I see dealt in each game are arrived at randomly.

When we try to make things random, like when we shuffle cards before dealing in a game of poker, we are just doing physical actions that we think mix the cards up from the last deal, and which we are unable to control, and which – important if you don’t want to get punched – our fellow players believe we cannot control.

You have probably seen the numbers for a Powerball lottery drawn, they are printed on balls that blow around in a container until one pops up through a chute, to be read by the lovely young lady employed for that task. The point of all that theatre and equipment is so that no one thinks anyone is determining which numbers come up. I was convinced, back when I had cable and could watch these things. There is just no reason to believe that any particular one of the balls in the container are more likely to pop to the surface than any other. However, if one could predict which balls were more likely to pop up, well – maybe one could make some money on the Lotto, eh?*

That’s what Lotto Champ does for you. Sortof. Maybe. Below is a photo from the website of the box in which the fine folks who ‘invented’ Lotto Champ will send you their software. It will only cost you $197 (marked waaaay down from $970 – something about 9 and 7 is attractive to these folks).

I hear all you skeptics out there asking – just what does this software do? Well, it is –

The Advanced
AI-Powered Tool For
Smarter Lottery Wins

Not only is Lotto Champ AI-powered, it is Advanced.

Do note that it says ‘smarter’ lottery wins, not ‘more frequent’.

I won’t bore you with details, you can find it online yourself easily, and the language on the site is remarkable in avoiding any claim that you will actually win more, or even win anything at all. It just tries to impress you with how awesomely cutting edge it all is.

And, the site guarantees ‘100% Satisfaction’ and a ’60-Day Money Back Guarantee’.

Class, what do you think happens if you go to the site and try to claim your money back after purchasing a Lotto Champ?

This is out and out fraud, but what is further notable is that these assholes don’t stop at trying to sell you a random-number generator, they also build fake ‘Review’ websites that pretend to have evaluated Lotto Champ and found it ‘100% legit’.

Here is the bottom line from one of these ‘independent review’ sites:

If you’re someone who plays the lottery regularly and wants to increase your odds with a smarter, AI-driven strategy — Lotto Champ is a game-changer. It’s affordable, easy to use, and packed with value thanks to the bonuses and lifetime access. With nothing to lose (thanks to the money-back guarantee) and everything to gain, this might just be the smartest lottery decision you ever make.

It is tempting to see this as another example of the enshittification of the world by the internet, but to be fair, these kinds of things have been around since governments first realized that state-run lotteries were a way to tax people with low numeracy. The internet only makes it easier to market this crap.

And, given that all the data on government lotteries I have ever seen makes it clear that the players are overwhelmingly from the bottom half of the income distribution, it is not likely true that Lotto Champ is mostly purchased by those with too much money. More likely, those with little money and even less smarts.

Which I think makes it more depressing.

_____

* It’s actually harder than that, because governments earn revenue from their lotteries. That means they pay out less than they take in. Always. That ‘vig’ means you have to do a lot better than random picking to hope to make money above what you spend on tickets.