Claudia Gray's Photo Blog

Nathan pyle’s newer comics are delightful

“Like traditional casinos, online sportsbooks use a variety of mechanisms to entice gamblers in and then to keep them betting. They use deceptive advertising, claiming generous “average” payouts when in reality “just 1.3 percent of [daily fantasy sports] players were collecting 91% of prize money,” according to a McKinsey report cited by Funt. Like traditional casinos, they employ “VIP hosts” to cosset heavy hitters, and they lure big bettors with comped Super Bowl trips and other complimentary goodies. For more ordinary suckers, their strategies have become more refined. For example, they track your betting frequency, and when it declines, they bombard you with special offers and incentives to get you going again. They are becoming shockingly sophisticated users of mined personal data. Because sportsbook apps require that users activate geolocation on their devices (ostensibly to be sure that gambling is legal where players are), they can pinpoint exactly where a gambler is sitting in a ballpark and use seat prices to infer income and wealth information. An exec at a geodata firm speculates to Funt that they could soon pinpoint the type, and price, of the residences in which bettors live. And of course the pure seamlessness of the apps, the incredible ease of moving money from a bank account into the app, is an enormous incentive to compulsive behavior: the drugs, the dealer, and the ATM all in a single, handheld device. Americans placed $150 billion in bets in 2024, a number that has continued to rise. DraftKings alone has nearly four million monthly users.”

Cat on tiny praying mat !!!

@muslimgamer​ and others might confirm this for me: AFAIK cats are Clean Creatures in Islam, so cats on prayer mats - especially their own mini prayer mats - aren’t offensive. One website I looked at said “cats will be cats, cats like to mirror people, and giving them their own mat helps stop them being a distraction during prayers.”

Kids Design Glass