I think people understand the odds are small. However, perhaps they perceive their chances of meaningfully turn around their life in other ways have even smaller odds. i.e. improbable vs actually impossible. At least the lottery doesn't care about your current circumstance and everyone has an equal (equally small) chance.
Secondly, because everyone realizes the chances are small, the real product being sold is Hope. Even the advertisements for the lotteries address this. The thing you're buying is 30 seconds of daydreaming so you can comfortably tackle the rest of the day.
Great to see you launch this! I know you've put a lot of work into it and I've found it fine going through the samples. (Disclaimer: family member of the OP)
Bit of feedback: It would be a little easier to jump into the Learning mode if it defaulted with more UI space.
Speciation of archaic humans is an attempt at applying discrete categorization to continuous phenomena. It's like looking at a rainbow and trying to figure out where red ends and orange begins. Also interesting is Homo Longi, which can be argued to be Denisovan, or maybe not, depending on where you want to draw the lines on the raindow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_longi
If any language was written like Chinese has the same answer -- the written form of Chinese was not necessarily meant to be phonetic, although there are portions of it that have evolved to be phonetic. The characters have meanings and the grammar is very fluid to the point where a sequence of characters stringed together (such as in poetry) can be interpreted and debated.
Cantonese and Mandarin are considered dialects, so I won't use that as an example, but this problem has already been solved in Korean. For a long time, Hangul did not exist and Korean scholars used Chinese as the written system despite speaking in a completely different language. This is obviously an old article (1999), but the fact that it doesn't consider how this is a solved problem from a real historical use case makes the musing incomplete.
Vacheron Constantin was founded in 1755 by Jean-Marc Vacheron, a watchmaker, who later took on a partner François Constantin who traveled the world managing sales of their highly complicated watches. In fact, the two (Vacheron and Constantin) barely ever met and communicated solely through letters. The "Overseas" model of watches, which is their most popular sports model, celebrates this fact in the name (that the company was literally built through communication over oceans) and VC is arguably one of the top 3 swiss watch brands that still thrives today.
I'm not saying that the business didn't have a physical location (it clearly did for manufacturing) but if two co-founders could build a remote-first startup using 1755 technology, there's no reason why early stage startups today with the power of Slack, Zoom, Email, Git, etc can't build the next generation of business in a fully remote fashion. Startups like this will naturally have a competitive advantage when hiring as well, as they'd be able to tap into a world-market, rather than a local-market.
Remote work is here to stay and companies that can find a good hybrid of remote and in-person will thrive going forward, as has always been the case, whether it's 1755 or 2055.
The real joke is that we as a society still give weight to institutions like Harvard. We as a whole are much more educated now and the idea that legacy institutions should serve as gatekeepers of education or validation thereof based on reputation alone seems outdated. These schools should be judged by the rigor and quality of their curriculum rather than the reputations of their past. And I say this as someone who graduated from one of these top schools.
I think everyone understands this barrier already, it's well discussed and my point was not to diminish the well-known challenges to the problem. The economic reasons I mentioned are another (much less discussed) angle that most people just aren't even aware of and is absolutely a barrier to large scale housing development.
Nothing. That's exactly what I mean when I say the cost is labor. The quoted price $450-$550 per square foot does not include land, permitting, soft costs, etc. That's just labor and materials.
Just offering up a food for thought, as I recently did some research in the cost of construction (for the Bay Area, California): I see a lot of comments denouncing NIMBY-ism for the lack of construction or other reasons to answer the question of "Why not just build more housing?" but I suspect this, as true as it is, is the most popular talking point because it's politically a juicy topic to talk about. However, at least in HCOL places like the Bay Area, there is also another very basic economic reason: Construction is simply too expensive.
The cost per square foot of standard construction (wood frame, slab foundation, nothing fancy in terms of doors and windows) is about $450-$550 per square foot. This sets a real hard lower bound on the price of net-new housing. If you're talking larger buildings (more concrete, steel frame, drilled pier foundations in consideration of soil conditions and structural weight) the costs start sky rocketing to unbelievable numbers. Sure we can point at bureaucracy and the permitting process, but when we're talking about large scale construction of SFH and multi-unit residential buildings, the permitting and legal barriers are a small slice of the overall cost pie.
In the Bay Area, and I suspect soon in various geo areas, labor is simply too expensive. (And labor is an input to a lot of costs along the supply chain as well, like wood, concrete, steel, and glass.) In a culture where we all strive to be white collar workers abstracted away from the real physical reality that our world still runs on physical objects, most importantly housing, perhaps "learn to code" is not the universal answer and there needs to be just as much "learn to plumb" or "learn to concrete". And I know this last point is politically touchy, but big buildings housing hundreds and thousands of residents simply don't get built by an all-middle-class society. You need cheap labor (or better yet cheap automation?) so that this housing problem is tractable at an economic level.
Secondly, because everyone realizes the chances are small, the real product being sold is Hope. Even the advertisements for the lotteries address this. The thing you're buying is 30 seconds of daydreaming so you can comfortably tackle the rest of the day.