Actually, given the probability of winning, each lottery ticket has a negative value, so... yeah, there's no way it isn't a waste of money. "You gotta be in it to win it" is nonsense and is exactly what the lottery commission relies on.
It's not about not wanting to change your culture, it's about wanting to keep the money and not go to jail... The parent wasn't suggesting that wanting to see other cultures drives people to commit fraud, the parent was wondering why people commit fraud and then continue to remain in the very punitive, very advanced nation where they committed the fraud.
Yeah, union organizers and war protesters in the early 1900s were jailed with similar excuses. Would you like to go to jail in 20 years for speaking out against the war in Iraq? Because when you start limiting speech, it's /usually/ not the right wing that suffers...
Speech on its own has no consequences. I'm on a phone so please do look up Brandenburg v. Ohio and the Brandenburg incitement test. Basically, the opinion of the courts since like 1969 has been that even "hateful" speech is protected because advocating some kind of lawlessness is not the same as actually encouraging or engaging in lawlessness.
Do also remember that for most of England and America's history, it wasn't "harmful" speech being punished, it was any speech that the ruling class deemed wrong. In America, this was overwhelmingly left-wig speech. Communists, anarchists, union activists, even pacifists were jailed under such laws as the Espionage Act of 1917. I'm not willing to put enough faith in the vagaries of public opinion to gamble free speech, and neither are American lawyers or historians. Furthermore, who would police such speech? Given how, for example, police in Charlottesville stood back and let the fascists and antifascists beat the stuffing out of each other, can you really imagine the State protecting speech such as "kill all landlords" and "fuck laws" and "smash capitalism" if it were suddenly legal to disallow certain types of political speech?
For most of Anglo legal history, there were strict punishments on "seditious" speech. Even as late as 1917 people were prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition Acts for speech that's way less pointed and vitriolic than the crap people get away with today. But still, free speech is for everyone. The Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that even "hate" speech is protected.
We should probably get rid of all of the social sciences just to be on the safe side then. I mean, really, how can we know anything about anything really?
Science is full of failed predictions. If you're poking around for some nefarious behavior (which seems to be common among climate change deniers), I suggest looking at oil companies.
Why is it that the tech set always forgets that CS pedantry != legal pedantry? Have we forgotten about intent? You can't just change the line to a regex that /just happens/ to match that URL and go "neener neener neener it's not the same!" Are you willing to argue in court that that line was changed and it /just so happened/ to match the domain from before? Do you have a plausible explanation for why that change would've been made that doesn't involve "well, we were trying to creatively skirt a DMCA takedown request"?