slot machines | InCity Times

We ran this New York Times story in January. We re-post it in light of tonight’s city council meeting. We ask all Worcesterites to please say NO TO THE SLOTS PARLOR IN GREEN ISLAND!! Thank you!

– Rosalie Tirella

How Slot Machines Raise Our Hopes, Even When We’re Losing

Lloyd Miller

By RANDALL STROSS, The New York Times

Published: January 13, 2013

STEP into a casino and chances are good that slot machines are filling much of the space, as far as the eye can see. That dominant presence reflects the preference of many customers for machine gambling over human-mediated table games. Not surprisingly, electronic game machines contribute a clear majority of casino revenue in the states that permit them.

What may not be so evident is how a shift in casino gambling to screen-based games contributes to gambling addiction. It’s a story that would fill a book – and just such a book has arrived: “Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas” by Natasha Dow Schüll, an associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at M.I.T. The book offers a history of digital technology in casino gambling and shows how it grabs hold of players in ways never before available to equipment makers.

Professor Schüll, a cultural anthropologist, spent considerable time in Las Vegas casinos as part of her research. She met players who told her how they sought to enter a mindless state, a “zone,” in which all else is obliterated, and to stay there as long as possible.

“You aren’t really there – you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with,” one subject said, describing the zone “where nothing else matters.”

This isn’t the only place where gamblers can reach such a state of mind. It’s also known to occur at table games and at the racetrack. But casino machines arguably supply the most immersive, distraction-free gambling experience.

Speed is one design element of modern gambling machines that helps preserve that zone. When the machines’ gear-driven handles were replaced by electronic push-buttons, the number of games that could be played in an hour doubled. On today’s video slots, played with credit cards instead of coins, players can complete a game in as little as three seconds. There is virtually no pause between plays, and virtually no opportunity to process what has just transpired. …

To read more, click here.

By Rosalie Tirella

… to Green Island. GOOD PAYING jobs if we play our cards right (bad pun intended).

But we can’t even begin to have a conversation around this intriguing project because the city has gone all puritanical on us and said NO WAY. City councilors are taking this interesting option off the table by taking/buying the site away from the owners of the site, at the old Wyman Gordans. It’s called eminent domain.

Good fucking luck!

This is insane. When a municipality takes someone’s house or property it is to make way for, usually, a huge public project like a highway, not because the owner’s plans for it gets city fathers’ panties all knotted.

Worcester shouldn’t take acres away from THE OWNER OF A PIECE OF PROPERTY because he wants to do something with it. Even if it feels a bit controversial, even if they pay the owner the fair price for it, in this case around four million bucks.

Worcester’s unskilled folks need good paying jobs, jobs that could pay them around $40 K a year. Good union jobs if we play our cards right.

Why keep our unskilled folks in Mcjobs when we can get them GOOD JOBS? Jobs that will turn their lives around.

This is wrong.

We need to discuss this option and work with the developer to leverage a bunch of good paying jobs FIR GREEN ISLANDERS.

The factories are gone. Not everyone is gonna go to college or even get a certificate to be a vet or lab tech or nurse. Some people haven’t the time, the money, the interest, and maybe even, and we have to face facts, the smarts.

That’s why the factories were so great. They provided good pay checks to just average or below average folks if they just showed up each day ready to work.OR If they had a good work ethic.

I have been to Mohegan Sun at least 20 times over the years.

Lots of fun. Great music. Great White Russians, one of my fave drinks. No I didn’t play the slots, and yes, the folks who did play slots looked a bit desperate. Many of them hooked up to mini oxygen tanks. Lots in wheel chairs. Lourdes for unlucky i guess.

But who is Worcester to judge? Let’s squeeze as many union jobs as we can. Let’s make sure the place provides at least second tier rock bands. Let’s make it classy and fun.

Let’s blow on the dice and give them a tumble.