Short Jackpot Quotes

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The biosphere only survives, today, by virtue of what prosthetic assistance we can afford it. The assemblers might keep that going, were the klept to founder. But I don’t trust that some last convulsive urge to short-term profit, some terminal short-sightedness, mightn’t bring an end to everything.
William Gibson (Agency (Jackpot, #2))
Your chances of winning the jackpot in the UK lottery, in which you must correctly guess 6 random numbers between 1 and 49, are around 1 in 14 million. In other words, if you play the lottery then take a flight, you are unfortunately more likely to die in the plane than win the lottery.
Erman Misirlisoy (Thought Traps: A Short Guide to Overcoming Your Brain's Cheap Tricks)
It follows from these results that wealthy people who are exposed to the suffering of others should exhibit less compassion than their poorer counterparts do, and this has been confirmed in the lab. When we experience compassion, though nobody knows why, our hearts slow down. Piff’s colleagues Michael Kraus and Jennifer Stellar hooked volunteers up to EKG devices and showed them two short videos, a “neutral” video of a woman explaining how to construct a patio wall and a “compassion” video of cancer-stricken children undergoing chemotherapy. Relative to the wealthier subjects, the poor ones not only reported higher levels of compassion for the children, they had a significantly larger slowdown in heart rate between the neutral video and the compassion video than their wealthy peers.
Michael Mechanic (Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All)
Money changes everything. In Billionaires, a book by political scientist Darrell West, one member of the three-comma club brought up his “get-a-senator” strategy—a handy tactic, given that a lone senator can block objectionable legislation or pull strings on a favored donor’s behalf. West recalls how Senator Rand Paul held up Senate action for years on a treaty that would have forced Swiss banks to reveal the names of twenty-two thousand wealthy Americans who had assets stashed in overseas accounts, presumably to evade taxes. (An invasion of privacy, Paul insisted.) In another case, a billionaire hedge fund manager persuaded Democratic senator Edward Markey to write a letter to the SEC calling for an investigation of Herbalife, a multilevel marketing company the financier suspected of fraud, and whose stock he also happened to be short-selling. The effort paid off. After Markey’s letter was made public, Herbalife’s share price plummeted 14 percent.
Michael Mechanic (Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All)
But as he approached fifty, Kenny yearned to do something different. Someone told him that More Than Money—the same inheritors group Jeff Weissglass got involved with—was hiring an executive director. He landed the position and, in short order, discovered that his pregnant teens had at least one thing in common with these young heirs and heiresses: Society defined and stereotyped both groups by how much money they did or didn’t have. The foundations that funded adolescent pregnancy care assumed the girls were getting knocked up because they were poor, “which was not necessarily true,” Kenny says, whereas the inheritors were pegged as “entitled and spoiled and lazy—and there’s no basis for that.” The anti-inheritor bias proved so toxic that some of Kenny’s former colleagues shunned him after he took the new job. “They’re like, ‘What a sellout! What a cop-out! Why would you do that?’ ” he recalls. “What does it say about our culture that everyone wants to win the lottery in some way, shape, or form, and there’s a whole segment of our culture that hates people who win the big payout.” This is indeed a paradox. Oscar Mayer heir Chuck Collins gave away his $500,000 inheritance in 1986, when he was a young man. (Invested in the S&P 500, it would be worth about $14 million today.) He has since dedicated himself, through the Institute for Policy Studies, to educating the American public about inequality. His memoir, Born on Third Base, includes the following scene: Speaking to a crowd of about 350 people, he asks who among them feels rage toward the wealthiest 1 percent. Almost everyone raises a hand. He then asks, “How many of you wish you were in the wealthiest 1 percent?” They laugh, but again, almost everyone. “People are envious,” Kenny says. “And what you end up doing with envy is demeaning whoever it is that you envy, because they have what we think we deserve.” During his time at More Than Money, Kenny grew friendly with Paul Schervish, then the director of the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy, and when Schervish offered him the associate director job, Kenny jumped. He’d seen how inheritors grappled with their unearned fortunes. Now he wanted to better understand their parents. Havens was the numbers guy “and I was in charge of: ‘I’d like to know what these people are thinking, and nobody ever asks them.’ 
Michael Mechanic (Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All)
The first hints of this emerged in the early and mid-1990s, at the tail end of the crack epidemic. Suniya Luthar is now sixty-two, with an infectious smile, bright brown eyes, and short snow-white hair. Back then, she was a fledgling psychologist working as an assistant professor and researcher in the department of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. She was studying resiliency among teenagers in low-income urban communities, and one of her early findings was that the most popular kids were also among the most destructive and aggressive at school. Was this a demographic phenomenon, she wondered, or merely an adolescent one, this tendency to look up to peers who acted out? To find out, she needed a comparison group. A research assistant suggested they recruit students from his former high school in an affluent suburb. Luthar’s team ultimately enlisted 488 tenth graders—about half from her assistant’s high school and half from a scruffy urban high school. The affluent community’s median household income was 80 percent higher than the national median, and more than twice that of the low-income community. The rich community also had far fewer families on food stamps (0.3 percent vs. 19 percent) and fewer kids getting free or reduced-price school lunches (1 percent vs. 86 percent). The suburban teens were 82 percent white, while the urban teens were 87 percent nonwhite. Luthar surveyed the kids, asking a series of questions related to depression and anxiety, drug use ranging from alcohol and nicotine to LSD and cocaine, and participation in delinquent acts at home, at school, and in the community. Also examined were grades, “social competence,” and teachers’ assessments of each student. After crunching the numbers, she was floored. The affluent teens fared poorly relative to the low-income teens on “all indicators of substance use, including hard drugs.” This flipped the conventional wisdom on its head. “I was quite taken aback,” Luthar recalls.
Michael Mechanic (Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All)
One thing I don’t see here today is customers. Luxury-car sales are “more lifestyle than automotive,” Christiansen explains. The vehicles follow the money. His team will cosponsor events with private jet manufacturers and fractional ownership services such as NetJets and XOJET, or with San Francisco’s St. Francis Yacht Club, to expose affluent people to vehicles “they don’t even know they want yet.” Customers wander in from time to time, of course. Rocker Sammy Hagar, a Ferrari collector who sold his Cabo Wabo tequila brand to Campari for $91 million, has been known to stop by the sister dealership in San Francisco “in flip-flops, torn shorts, ratted hair, and a T-shirt. You wouldn’t think the guy has two dimes to rub together if you didn’t know who he was,” Christiansen says. Another guy showed up at the Walnut Creek lot dressed like a plumber and configured a $260,000 Bentley. He was, in fact, a plumber—one who owned a thriving plumbing business. He’d arrived in another Bentley, now on consignment.
Michael Mechanic (Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All)
Look like you’ve come up short on the number of fucks you need to not give,
William Gibson (The Peripheral (Jackpot #1))
But I don’t trust that some last convulsive urge to short-term profit, some terminal shortsightedness, mightn’t bring an end to everything.
William Gibson (Agency (Jackpot, #2))
I dislike calling them stubs,” Lowbeer said. “They’re short because we’ve only just initiated them, by reaching into the past and making that first contact. We should call them branches, as they literally are.
William Gibson (Agency (Jackpot, #2))