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From Vox
Why we love animals — and love to eat them -
In a new book, The Meat Paradox, Rob Percival says humanity’s complicated relationship with animals is caused by cognitive dissonance brought about by our empathy for animals and desire to eat them. | Sara Miedema/Getty Images
Humanity’s paradoxical relationship with meat, explained.
We human beings deeply love animals, but we also love to eat them. Almost one in four American adults tells pollsters they’re cutting back on their meat intake — while the country sets new records for per capita meat consumption. We abhor the treatment of animals on factory farms, where 99 percent of meat in the US is produced, yet we dislike vegans. And even those of us who say we’re vegetarian or vegan are often stretching the truth.
There’s a term for humanity’s fraught relationship with meat and the animals slaughtered to produce it: the meat paradox.
Australian psychologists Steve Loughnan, Nick Haslam, and Brock Bastian coined the term in 2010, defining it as the “psychological conflict between people’s dietary preference for meat and their moral response to animal suffering.” We empathize with animals — after all, we are animals ourselves — but we’re also hardwired to seek calorie-dense, energy-rich foods. And for most of human history, that meant meat.
The push and pull between empathizing with animals while also eating them creates a cognitive dissonance that can cause us to ignore how they’re treated on industrial farms, or outright deny their sentience, intelligence, and capacity to suffer.
The meat paradox is also the subject and title of a new book by Rob Percival, head of food policy at the Soil Association, a UK-based nonprofit that advocates for organic farming practices, higher animal welfare, and lower meat consumption.
I wanted to speak to Percival because he is a walking embodiment of the meat paradox. He spends his days campaigning against industrialized animal agriculture while insisting animals should still play a role in our farming and food system, albeit a much smaller and more humane one.
Percival is quite sympathetic to the vegan cause, going so far as to call animal slaughter “murder,” but isn’t a vegan himself and doesn’t hesitate to criticize the vegan movement’s eccentricities and exaggerations. And he’s gravely worried about what will happen to the world if humanity can’t figure out how to resolve the meat paradox. The West’s meat-heavy diet is a major accelerant to the climate crisis that shows little sign of slowing, and that diet is already being exported to the rest of the world.
So in an effort to unravel the meat paradox, Percival talked to farmers, anthropologists, psychologists, and activists to better understand humanity’s messy, complicated, and millennia-deep relationship to the animals we hunt and farm for food.
The meat paradox in ourselves
Percival found that the meat paradox isn’t just a product of modern-day industrialized animal farming, but a psychological struggle that goes back to our earliest ancestors. Those animal carvings and cave paintings made tens of thousands of years ago? They may be more than mere caveman doodles.
“It’s partly speculative, but the case has been made by variousscholars that these provide evidence of a ritual response to animal consumption which may well have been rooted in those dissonant emotions, that conflicted ethical sense,” Percival said. “There’s a profound moral dilemma posed by the killing and consumption of animal persons.”
But the meat paradox has intensified in the modern age. One of the founding studies of the meat paradox literature, Percival told me, was the one published by Loughnan, Haslam, and Bastian in 2010. They gave questionnaires to two groups, and while the subjects filled in answers, one group was given cashews to snack on while the other group was given beef jerky. The surveys asked participants to rate the sentience and intelligence of cows and their moral concern for a variety of animals, such as dogs, chickens, and chimpanzees.
The participants who ate the beef jerky rated cows less sentient and less mindful — and extended their circle of moral concern to fewer animals — than the group that ate the cashews.
“The act of thinking about a cow’s mental capabilities while eating a cow had created these dissonant emotions beneath the surface, which had skewed their perception in really important ways,” Percival said.
Even exposure to strict vegetarians or vegans can elicit a “heightened commitment to pro-meat justifications,” Percival says about one study. This might explain why we see per capita meat consumption rise in tandem with rates of veganism and vegetarianism.
One of the funnier and more telling passages of the book details a meeting Percival had with Charles Way, the head of food quality assurance for KFC in the UK and Ireland. After Way tells Percival how proud he is of KFC’s animal welfare standards, Percival asks Way, “If you knew that you were going to be reborn as a chicken, would you really prefer to be born onto a farm in KFC’s supply chain, more than on any other farm in the UK?”
Way asserts the company’s standards are above the industry norm (which isn’t saying much), but then says it wouldn’t make a difference, “so no.” Percival tries again: “If you knew that you were going to be reborn as a chicken, do you think you would eat less chicken?”
By Percival’s telling, Way simply doesn’t reply.
When confronted with these dissonant emotions through reports on the harsh reality of factory farming, we try to deny them, dissociating the meat on our plate from the animal that produced it, and in doing so, denying animals of their sentience and intelligence.
We make myths to justify our relationship with animals, too. One of the more popular ones is the “ancient contract,” which goes something like this: Animals give us their meat, and in exchange, we give them domestication and thus an opportunity to evolutionarily succeed. This concept was coined by science writer Stephen Budiansky in 1989 and has been touted by food writers Michael Pollan and Barry Estabrook, as well as iconic animal welfare scientist Temple Grandin.
Pollan and Estabrook don’t condone modern-day industrial animal farming, and Estabrook says it’s a violation of this ancient contract. However, “there is a glaring deceit at the heart of our ancient contract,” Percival writes: “No individual animal has consented to the terms of the deal.”
We also use language to obscure; one study found that replacing “slaughtering” or “killing” with “harvesting” reduced dissonance, and that replacing “beef” and “pork” on restaurant menus with “cow” and “pig” generated more empathy for animals. Adding a photo of an animal next to the dish further elevated empathy, while also making vegetarian dishes more appealing to study participants.
Percival says the meat paradox can be found across cultures and time periods, and that “there is no culture in which plant foods are problematic in the same way.”
The meat paradox in our institutions
The meat paradox is just as active in our institutions as in ourselves.
Percival’s book opens with a tour of the Natural History Museum of London, where exhibits tell the story of animals’ habitat loss and the effects of climate change on wildlife. But then when you visit the museum’s restaurant, “you might be served food which directly contributed to all those crises,” Percival said. (Meat production is a leading cause of habitat loss, as large swaths of forest are cleared to grow soy and other crops to feed farmed animals.)
Eventually, the museum changed up its menu — offering plant-based dishes, higher-welfare meat, and organic foods — after a pressure campaign from Percival.
That story had a happy ending, but I worry the meat paradox will only harden in ourselves and in our institutions as meat becomes more grist for the culture war, as when some Republicans freaked out over a made-up story that the Green New Deal would result in a “burger ban.” To overcome that, Percival argues, we need to stake out a middle ground in the meat debate.
“We need progressive farmers and omnivores to be trying to defuse the tensions with vegans and animal activists, and we need the vegans who say, ‘Okay, step one is let’s phase out the industrial systems and focus on higher animal welfare,’” he told me. “And if you can get a large enough demographic to claim that middle ground, then we might see some progress.”
The middle ground is a hard place to be in an increasingly polarized world. But there are signs of progress: Whenever voters are given the choice to ban cages for hens or pigs, they vote yes, and plant-based meat has gone mainstream in recent years.
And since more bold regulation, like a meat tax, would be politically toxic right now, the change has to start with us.
“I’m not of the view that individuals can fix all this on their own or that it’s the sole responsibility of consumers to fix the food system,” Percival said. “But at the same time, I am of the view that our own choices are influential. They help set social norms. And you need that sort of mass mobilization before political change becomes viable, before you can force businesses to change.”
And to get there, we first need to reflect upon the meat paradox within ourselves, which would allow us, he said, to “see our sort of complicity and entanglements in all this and understand what it might mean to begin to disentangle ourselves.”
Changing how we eat is one of the most effective actions we can take for the climate, but it’s also one of the most personal, as evidenced by the deep- seated influence of the meat paradox. But freeing ourselves from its dissonance really could help us claw our way out of some of the crises we find ourselves in — if we’re willing to confront it.
Scientists are recruiting elephant seals to eavesdrop on whales -
Male elephant seals in San Simeon, California. | Getty Images
Elephant seals will help scientists monitor secretive marine mammals in the deep ocean.
Roughly a decade ago, a team of biologists glued audio recording devices onto the backs of a handful of elephant seals on the California coast. They wanted to know if the seals — identified as males by their cartoonish faces with trunk-like noses — make noises as they swim out to sea in search of food.
The recordings they brought back caught the researchers by surprise. There was no evidence of seals vocalizing while foraging, but the devices did pick up something else: the eerie, clicking calls of sperm whales, which sound like someone walking up a creaky staircase. Some of the calls also seemed to get louder, leading the researchers to believe that the seals were swimming toward the whales, and maybe even eavesdropping on them to find food.
Nothing much came of that discovery, but it has inspired marine biologists to use seals as a tool to eavesdrop on other marine life. Elephant seals spend about nine months each year at sea and travel across far reaches of the Pacific that would otherwise be difficult for scientists to survey. And like migratory birds, the seals return to the same spot year after year, so researchers can equip them with recording devices and retrieve them relatively easily.
As soon as next week, marine biologists at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) will test out this slippery technique. They’ll attach acoustic monitors to a few northern elephant seals before the animals depart for a little over two months.
If all goes as planned, it will be the first time scientists use animals — rather than a network of underwater microphones — to spy on marine life in the deep ocean for longer than a few days. What they overhear could help scientists unlock the mysteries of elusive marine mammals, such as beaked whales, and understand how poorly known ecosystems are changing as the planet warms.
Why seals make such good spies
Scientists have used audio recording devices to monitor marine life for decades. It’s a common way to survey species like the rare vaquita porpoise. What makes this project unique, however, is that these devices won’t be fixed in place or dangling from a boat — they’re attached to living, breathing, moving animals.
Elephant seals might look clumsy on land, but they’re agile underwater creatures that make ideal marine sentinels. They spend months at a time foraging far offshore, not even returning home to sleep. The animals likely take naps while drifting a few hundred meters underwater, said Roxanne Beltran, an assistant professor at UCSC who’s co-leading the project.
Elephant seals descend as much as a mile underwater when hunting for small fish, squid, and even sharks, and that brings them within earshot of whales and other marine mammals. Conveniently enough, seals themselves don’t make much noise. “They’re not contaminating the data,” said Holger Klinck, an expert in bioacoustics at Cornell University who’s co-leading the project with Beltran. “They’re really only measuring what’s going on in their surroundings.”
Perhaps most importantly, the seals return to the same beach each year, which reduces the risk of losing equipment. For the project at UCSC, each recording device is roughly the size of an old cellphone and costs about $5,000. It isn’t capable of beaming acoustic data back to shore, Beltran said, so if you lose the device, you lose everything.
Courtesy of Dan Costa
A mother and baby elephant seal at Año Nuevo, a beach in Northern California.
Getty Images/iStockphoto
Elephant seals at Año Nuevo State Park in California.
Using an epoxy adhesive, Beltran and Allison Payne, a doctoral researcher at UCSC, will glue recording devices onto three female seals at Año Nuevo Reserve in Northern California. (Females have a much higher survival rate and reliably head out to sea right after weaning their pups.) Beltran is building on research led by UCSC’s Dan Costa, who heads a project to monitor local seals that dates back to the 1960s.
Then they’ll wait. The seals will make it about a quarter of the way to Japan before turning back, in a trip that takes roughly 75 days. The device will record about 40 days of audio before the batteries run out, while other tags measure things like location, depth, and water temperature, leaving the scientists with lots of clues to what’s happening in a largely unknown stretch of ocean.
Uncovering mysteries of the deep
When the animals return, scientists will meet them on the beach and retrieve the devices before sending the seals on their way. (The devices don’t harm the seals or change their behavior, Beltran said.) Then they’ll run the audio through computer algorithms that separate out the unique sounds made by each species. A humpback whale can sound a bit like a whining puppy crossed with Chewbacca, for example, while orcas often sound like a metal detector gone haywire.
Payne will be listening closely for the echolocating clicks of beaked whales. This group of toothy marine animals, often gray or black and white, have eluded scientists for decades. “We know almost nothing about them,” she told Vox.
Beaked whales make up more than a quarter of living cetaceans (a group that includes dolphins, porpoises, and whales), but scientists don’t know where they go in the ocean or what they do, she said. They spend most of their time deep underwater and rarely surface for air, Payne added. There are more than 20 species of beaked whales, and much of what we know about them comes from carcasses that occasionally wash up on shore.
Getty Images/iStockphoto
A Cuvier’s beaked whale in the Bay of Biscay, in the northeast Atlantic Ocean.
It’s hard to protect a species you don’t understand, Payne said. For example, researchers thinkthatnoise from shipping traffic harms beaked whales, but scientists can’t say for sure — because they simply don’t know what these animals are doing.
Researchers also hope to build an auditory archive of the ocean over years to understand how marine communities are changing, especially as the planet heats up. How, for example, is the giant patch of warm water in the Pacific Ocean, dubbed “the blob,” affecting marine communities? “The elephant seals can help us collect information where we have little to no data,” Klinck told Vox.
For now, Beltran and her team are just trying to prove that it can work. If it does, she hopes to scale it up and start collecting sounds in all kinds of marine environments — not just far offshore, but near the coast and even under Arctic ice. Perhaps in the future, legions of elephant seals will unwittingly survey the ocean in the name of science.
Who wins and who loses when you gamble on sports -
Patrons at The Main Event in Plainview, New York, on February 10th, 2022, just days ahead of the Super Bowl. | Alejandra Villa Loarca/Newsday RM via Getty Image
Inside the sports betting land grab, where everybody wins, except (probably) you.
I’m not a huge sports person. I’m definitely not a gambler. And yet, on a Thursday night in mid-January, I found myself quite excited that my parlay bet that the Milwaukee Bucks would win and Giannis Antetokounmpo would achieve a triple-double had paid off. I’d turned $11 into $130 essentially at random — I had to ask a friend what a triple-double was — with a handful of taps on my phone. “Is sports betting actually good?” I wondered. More selfishly, I thought, “Am I a secret genius at it?”
The answer to the latter question was absolutely not — my early luck wore out about a week later, when I started to lose money. The answer to the former question is tougher to assess. Sure, sports betting is fun. But is it good for society? Probably not so much. What is clear is that there’s an enormous amount of money being thrown at it, with sportsbooks — meaning companies that let you place bets on sports, like DraftKings — spending billions of dollars to suck people in. Leagues, media companies, and teams are recognizing the moneymaking opportunity, too. (Disclosure: The sports site SB Nation, which is owned by Vox’s parent company, Vox Media, has a partnership with DraftKings.)
“You’re talking about an industry that is in land-rush mode, where there are more competitors than there will be winners,” said Chris Grove, CEO of American Affiliate, a company that recruits new customers for sportsbooks. “We are absolutely in a heightened marketing environment right now.”
Sports betting is everywhere. It and crypto were basically the themes of this year’s Super Bowl commercials. In New York, where online sports betting became legal on January 8, it feels inescapable — the other weekend, I watched part of an hour-long DraftKings infomercial twice. Within the first 10 days of sports betting being allowed in the state, 1.2 million new accounts were created, most of them by people completely new to the space.
New York surpassed $1 billion in total bets in just over two weeks, and the state’s reported total hit nearly $2 billion in wagers over the first 30 days, generating $70 million in tax revenue. New York is hardly an anomaly. According to the Action Network, as of mid-February, full online and mobile sports betting is legal in 13 states, including Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, and in-person sportsbooks or limited mobile betting options are available in multiple more. A sports law expert told me he thinks it will basically become legal everywhere but Utah at some point.
The goal of sportsbooks and casinos, whatever marketers tell you, is to separate people from their money. The push coming from companies indicates they believe there’s a lot of cash to be had here, and that pulling out all the stops to acquire customers — including taking the risk of ultimately losing the turf war — is worth it. The more customers they get, the bigger they get, and the better they become at figuring out exactly who they need to be targeting and how. The goal is to get their hooks in and then have at it with more offers and options to keep extracting cash.
“Hovering over all of this is not what kind of value will I extract from customers from sports betting, it’s what am I going to be able to sell that user base three, five, 10 years down the road?” Grove said. “There is an ever- expanding universe of ways to spend money on uncertain outcomes, and the most bullish sportsbook operators believe that they’re going to be able to offer a buffet of those to customers at some point in the future.”
You can imagine a world where a sportsbook also offers crypto trading, or sports stadiums that offer betting and online poker. Gambling, a longtime no-no in sports, is now driving the money train. With dollar signs in view, the moral calculus has changed.
Why sports betting ads are everywhere
In recent years, the ground has shifted in the relationship in the US between gambling and sports. The rise of DraftKings and FanDuel has made daily fantasy sports, where people assemble made-up teams of real players, more prevalent. Instead of people picking their fantasy teams at the start of a season, they’re able to keep at it all season long. While that doesn’t technicallycount as sports gambling (it’s supposedly a game of skill), it kind of is. Regardless, in 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a federal law prohibiting sports gambling, opening the door for states to legalize it.
Companies like FanDuel, DraftKings, Caesars, and MGM are spending a ton of money to establish themselves as leaders in the space. It could be a little questionable as a business venture, given profit margins. As Sahil Patel at the Information notes, betting services usually keep $6 for every $100 bet made, and after taxes and marketing, that can drop to as little as $1.
Apparently, though, these companies have made the calculation that the low margins are worth it, and this will all pay off down the line.
Take the example of Caesars, the casino and hotel company whose commercials for sports betting have become inescapable lately. I see actor J.B. Smoove’s face, who plays Caesar in the company’s ads, more than I see pretty much any of my family or friends. If I could choose an “I get it” option to get out of seeing the Caesars stuff at this point, I would. Caesars isn’t just spending money on marketing, it’s also giving out big bonuses that make at least dabbling in sports betting super appealing. For a while, it was matching deposits up to $3,000, and handing out a $300 bonus and other offers to get people to sign up.
Eric Hession, co-president of Caesars Digital, told me the company hopes to differentiate itself through integration with its rewards program tied to its casino brands. Sports betting gives Caesars a new line to its existing customers, for example, getting a New Yorker who frequents its casinos when in Las Vegas to start betting with the app on NFL games. But it also serves as a pipeline to get new customers into its broader ecosystem — customers who are often a different demographic from the usual. Caesars’ current database tends to skew older and more female, with slots being among the most popular games. Sports bettors skew younger and male.
“One thing I know about this from people in the gambling industry is that everyone’s looking for a younger audience,” said Andrew Brandt, a former Green Bay Packers executive and the director of the Moorad Center for the Study of Sports Law at Villanova University. “Everyone wants to engage young people because these sports fans are skewing older, especially for a sport like baseball, and that casino engagement is skewing much older. So the best way to attract young fans is this new sports betting.”
Caesars’ hope is that once people are into sports betting, they stay in, that they keep playing after the bonuses are dried up, and maybe start hitting up their casinos. While the bonusing may seem like a lot, casinos are deeply experienced with the mechanism of giving things away in order to make more later.
To be sure, not everyone’s going to do that. Once I bet through the $300 bonus on Caesars, I took the $400 or so in my account (thanks largely to that Giannis bet) and cashed out. Some people put in $3,000, got the match, and, once they bet through that, cashed out, sometimes making a few thousand free dollars. When I raised that possibility to Hession, he acknowledged it wasn’t ideal.
“We assume there’s a certain percentage of people who will do that, and it’s too bad that that’s the reality,” he said.
It’s hard to feel too bad for Caesars. After all, it’s a business, and if they’re out to get people’s money, it’s only fair that people have the opportunity to try to get their money, too. Just as gamblers accept risk when they place a bet, Caesars is taking on a bit of a risk that its spending on sports betting will pay off — it thinks it will be profitable in sports betting by 2023’s football season.
“Traditionally, sports betting has been more of an amenity within the casino, but now that it’s able to be mobile, it’s going to be a much bigger part of the company going forward,” Hession said. Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision, it was allowed in Nevada, where both mobile and in-person sports betting were available, though everyone had to register in person at a casino first (it’s still the case there). Delaware also offered parlay betting on the NFL.
In the sports betting land grab, there are going to be losers and consolidation as some players inevitably win out. Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, said that within the gambling industry there is debate about whether the bonuses that companies are offering to get customers is excessive — hence why companies are being so aggressive at getting people in and getting them hooked.
“There’s a lot of marketing technology aimed at separating gamblers from their money,” he said. “The amount of data the industry collects and the way they utilize that is really underexplored.”
The more people who start sports betting, the more data the industry collects so that companies and marketers can better identify and target potential new customers as the sector expands. The leagues are producing data, too, as a way to make money and give sportsbooks more for customers to bet on. The ideal customer is someone who’s cheap to acquire, who’s sticky, and who’s likely to expand their wallet as sportsbooks offer them new products. When I took my money and ran after the bonus, maybe I helped Caesars avoid someone like me in the future.
Matt Heiman, CEO of The Game Day, a sports betting online entertainment network that helps funnel customers to sportsbooks, said his company is getting better at figuring out what types of new bettors will really pay off — and that sports betting companies are willing to pay for it. Heyman says that with the number of customers they’re converting for sportsbooks operators, they’re starting to be able to suss out “what looks like a good customer versus a bad customer.”
Even if people do manage to get in and get out initially, they sometimes return. I recently found myself out with someone who’d lightly admonished me over my short-lived betting habit, warning me it was a bad idea. He claimed he’d gotten on and off the train (betting through a website in Anguilla) long ago and wasn’t about to start again. While at the bar, I noticed him checking scores on the ESPN app — turns out he’d placed some new bets. He knows infinitely more about sports than I do. I think he still lost.
Everybody wins, except maybe us
Professional sports leagues spent a lot of time pushing back on sports betting but suddenly became mostly fine with it once it was legalized. The reason: It’s lucrative.
“Up until 2018, they were saying betting on sports is a threat to the very foundation of the game. Now, they are actively partnered with the gambling companies. There’s a lot of money to be made,” Whyte said. Sports betting, like fantasy, is an incredible fan engagement tool. It gets people to watch games they might not otherwise be interested in, and watch to the end. “Why is a fan in New York going to care about a game between Seattle and Denver?” Whyte said. “The reason is almost 100 percent gambling.”
Sports betting is a potential boon for media companies and TV networks trying to get a piece of the pie. As Rick Maese points out in the Washington Post, Barstool Sports and Fox Bet have sportsbooks available in several states, and ESPN has reportedly been looking at licensing deals that could total at least $3 billion. And the states legalizing sports betting? They’re on board, too. It’s tax revenue after all (part of which goes to funding gambling addiction treatment).
“You don’t see the state of New York saying, ‘Hey, buy another carton of cigarettes because we put a really high tax on that, too,’” Whyte said. “As far as I know, [gambling] is the only addictive activity that the state legalizes, monopolizes, and monetizes.”
Sports betting worsening gambling addiction is obviously an important concern. According to the National Council on Problem Gambling, people who bet on sports and pay to play daily fantasy are two to three times likelier than other gamblers to report “problematic play,” and an estimated 6 million Americans struggle with a gambling addiction. Companies say they want people to bet responsibly and that they have guardrails in place to make sure people don’t get in over their heads, but the fact of the matter is, to keep the business going, they’ve got to get people hooked and keep them coming back. Bettors often come to believe that they’re especially skilled at their wagers, but most aren’t.
“If you’re an exceptionally talented sports bettor, you’re good 50 and a quarter percent of the time. There’s a reason the house always wins,” said Patrick Keane, CEO of the Action Network, a sports media company. But sports betting, like all gambling, is good business. “It’s recession-proof; it’s withstood the millennia of consumer activity and interest.”
Sports betting companies, media companies, and sports leagues appear to believe the sky is the limit on sports betting right now. Grove, from American Affiliate, says he’s keeping an eye out for sports stakeholders such as arenas and teams getting further into the game.
In Arizona, for example, many teams have gotten licenses in conjunction with sportsbooks, but they could start operating on their own, too, and expand more into other gambling operations. “The question of what happens when states move beyond sports betting and start authorizing online casinos as well, do sports stakeholders go along for that ride, too? Is this a path to convergence, where sports stakeholders are really now on track to become full-fledged gambling operators?” Grove said.
There’s also likely to be a lot of consolidation in the industry as certain players win and lose and the field of sportsbooks is winnowed down. That means a lot of customers — and a lot of data — is going to be rolled up in the hands of just a few players eventually.
I have a hard time figuring out exactly how to feel about sports betting. On the one hand, it can be a good time, and it brings in revenue for states to go toward spending that is, presumably, good. New York puts a whopping 51 percent tax on sports betting revenue. Plus, illegal sports betting was already happening, so it might be better to have it out in the open.
On the other hand, it’s hard not to wonder whether this is another vice that truly needs to be made legal. Being able to bet on sports essentially 24/7 from your phone is super easy to get sucked into. This is almost guaranteed to exacerbate gambling addiction. The ads from Caesars are essentially like, “Hey, emperor, don’t you want to put down $50 on the game later?” with the immediate follow-up: “Also, FYI, here’s a hotline for your gambling addiction.”
A new raft of stories warning about gambling addiction are already starting to crop up. It’s hard not to worry about the people who are playing with money they can’t afford to lose, or wonder what it says about the state of our economy that so many people are willing to play in an arena where the odds are so obviously stacked against them, all in the hopes of hitting it big. Then again, aren’t the economic odds stacked against us always?
I didn’t entirely get got with sports betting — at least not yet. Although, I will say that since withdrawing the $428.53 from the app, I have missed it. I know, objectively, that in gambling, losing is only a question of time. I got out while I was ahead, but a lot of people won’t. And that’s exactly what the sports betting industry is placing very big bets on.
We live in a world that’s constantly trying to sucker us and trick us, where we’re always surrounded by scams big and small. It can feel impossible to navigate. Every two weeks, join Emily Stewart to look at all the little ways our economic systems control and manipulate the average person. Welcome to The Big Squeeze.
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From Ars Technica
Apple will add fifth US English Siri voice in iOS 15.4 - “We work to make the experience feel as personalized as possible,” Apple said. - link
X-rays help unlock secrets of King Tut’s iron dagger, made from a meteorite - It was forged at low temperatures and may have been a wedding gift to Tut’s grandfather. - link
Aaron Rodgers’ go-to cleanse could involve oily enemas, bloodletting, vomiting - Cleanse stems from ancient Indian medicine that has little proven benefit, links to poisonings. - link
Musk says he wants to install Steam games in Tesla infotainment centers - Expansive gaming platform could be a good use for powerful cars’ AMD GPUs. - link
Pixel 7 leaks show Google finally has a consistent phone business - The Pixel 7 looks like the Pixel 6, and that shows maturation from Google Hardware. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
A king had 10 wild dogs. He used them to torture and kill any minister that misguided him. -
A king had 10 wild dogs. He used them to torture and kill any minister that misguided him.
A minister once gave an opinion which was wrong and which the king didn’t like at all… So he ordered that the minister to be thrown to the dogs.
The minister said, "I served you loyally 10 years and you do this..?
The king was unrelenting.
Minister pleaded“Please give me 10 days before you throw me to the dogs” The king agreed.
In those 10 days the minister went to the keeper of the dogs and told him he wanted to serve the dogs for the next 10 days…
The guard was baffled… But he agreed. So the minister started feeding the dogs, caring for them, washing them, providing all sorts of comfort for them.
So when the 10 days were up…
The king ordered that the minister be thrown to the dogs as sentenced .
When he was thrown in, everyone was amazed at what they saw.. The dogs were wagging their tails playing with the condemned minister..licking his feet.
The king was baffled at what he saw. ” what happened to the dogs? !!!” He growled.
The minister then said;” I served the dogs for only 10 days and they didn’t forget my service… Yet I served you for 10 years and you forgot all at the first mistake!”…
The Pope dies and stands in front of the gates of heaven. -
St. Peter looks at him confused:" Who are you? I don’t know you." The Pope says" I’m the Pope, the holy father“. Peter scrolls through his holy book” Pope, Pope, holy father….. nope, not in here“. Now the Pope is confused”But I’m God’s representative on earth." Peter says " Pease wait a minute" and rushes to God’s office. Out of breath he asks God " Xcuse me Boss, there is someone standig at the gates saying his name is Pope and he’s your representative on earth" God is puzzled and says" What in hell? I have a what on earth? JEEEEESUS, come over son!" Jesus comes over “Yes Dad, what’s up?” God asks him “Go to the gates and have a look at that guy saying he’s my representative” Jesus heads off and returns a few minutes later, laughing out loud. “Dad, you remember the small fishing club I founded about 2000 years ago? You won’t believe it, it still exists..”
she says: “i think you’re the father of one of my kids”
he thinks about the only time he was unfaithful to his wife, and he says: “oh my god, are you the stripper that was at my bachelor party? the one i banged on the pool table while all my friends watched?”
A husband notices that his wife’s hearing is deteriorating, and decides to visit her doctor for advice. -
“I can’t speak to my wife directly as she might find it offensive, given our old age” he says to the doc.
“There’s a simple trick you can try to determine her hearing” explains the doctor. “Simply ask her a question at a distance and if she doesn’t hear you, move slightly closer and ask again until she does”.
That night, the husband arrives home and sees his wife in the kitchen cooking. He thinks to himself, “what a perfect opportunity to test her hearing”.
He stands in the doorway of the kitchen and promptly asks;
“What’s for dinner honey?”
No answer. He moves closer.
“What’s for dinner honey?”
Still no answer. He moves even closer.
“What’s for dinner honey?”
Still his wife doesn’t answer. He now sees how serious her hearing problem is. At this point, he is stood right next to his wife.
“What’s for dinner honey?”
“FOR THE FOURTH FUCKING TIME WE’RE HAVING CHICKEN”
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