Dinhternet

I had read about War­ren Buffett’s “Ovar­ian Lot­tery” before, but a reminder always helps.

Here’s the meat of it, for those of you who don’t want to click on the link -

It’s 24 hours before your birth, and a genie appears to you. He tells you that you can set the rules for the world you’re about to enter — eco­nomic, social, polit­i­cal — the whole enchi­lada. Sounds great, right? What’s the catch?

Before you enter the world, you will pick one ball from a bar­rel of 6.8 bil­lion (the num­ber of peo­ple on the planet). That ball will deter­mine your gen­der, race, nation­al­ity, nat­ural abil­i­ties, and health — whether you are born rich or poor, sick or able-bodied, bril­liant or below aver­age, Amer­i­can or Zimbabwean.

This is what Buf­fett calls the ovar­ian lot­tery. As he explained to a group of Uni­ver­sity of Florida stu­dents, “You’re going to get one ball out of there, and that is the most impor­tant thing that’s ever going to hap­pen to you in your life.”

Accord­ing to the world’s third-richest man, that’s a good per­spec­tive to have when set­ting the rules for our world. We should be design­ing a soci­ety that, as Buf­fett says, “doesn’t leave behind some­one who acci­den­tally got the wrong ball and is not well-wired for this par­tic­u­lar sys­tem.” He points out that he is designed for the Amer­i­can sys­tem — and he was lucky to be born into it. He can allo­cate cap­i­tal, and he lives in a place and at a time when those skills are well rewarded. (His pal Bill Gates is quick to point out that if Buf­fett had been born in an ear­lier time, he’d be some animal’s lunch because the Ora­cle of Omaha can’t run fast or climb trees.)

When Buf­fett talks about this lot­tery, he often con­cludes by asking:

If you could put your ball back, and they took out, at ran­dom, a hun­dred other balls, and you had to pick one of those, would you put your ball back in? Now, of those hun­dred balls … roughly five of them will be Amer­i­can. … Half of them are going to be below-average intel­li­gence, half will be above. Do you want to put your ball back? Most of you, I think, will not. … What you’re say­ing is, “I’m in the luck­i­est 1% of the world right now.”

Everything’s about per­spec­tive. When­ever I think I have it rough, I think about if I would trade it for one of those hun­dred other balls, and things don’t look so bad. Espe­cially today, Black April. It’s the anniver­sary of the Fall of Saigon, when Amer­ica pulled out of the Viet­nam War, a defin­ing moment for three gen­er­a­tions of my fam­ily. I think of all that my par­ents and grand­par­ents did to give me a bet­ter pick in the lot­tery than what they had drawn, and I won­der if I’ll be able to do the same for the next generation.

… then you haven’t got anything.

One of the worst things about my job right now is my lack of health insur­ance. Just another perk of being a stu­dent that I didn’t take advan­tage of while I could have.

Some times, it’s lit­tle things, like tummy aches as I switched to veg­e­tar­i­an­ism or when I got the snif­fles right as Joe M was get­ting over his swine flu. Some­times, it’s a lit­tle more seri­ous, like when I fell while snow­board­ing and my ribs hurt for nearly a solid month. Most of the time, I self-diagnose like so:

(From Basic Instruc­tions.)

For seri­ous cases, I might enlist my par­ents or the inter­net for advice.

I know there are peo­ple out there worse off than me. While my job isn’t the high­est pay­ing, it’s still above min­i­mum wage. I don’t have depen­dents to worry about. And I’m still rel­a­tively young. It’s actu­ally a safe bet for me to skimp on health insur­ance. There are a lot of peo­ple who can­not say the same.

Would I pre­fer to health insur­ance? Of course, but I don’t because I can’t afford it. I’ve been fol­low­ing news about the health care bill pretty care­fully because of this. Manda­tory cov­er­age is scary. Hope­fully the reduced costs get real­ized simul­ta­ne­ously and not “soon after.”

So Leg­ends of Zork just opened out of closed beta yes­ter­day. It’s a browser-based adven­ture game based on the old Zork series.

For you young folks who don’t know, Infocom’s Zork games were a series of text-based adven­ture games from back in the day of DOS boxes with no graph­ics or “win­dows.” The screen would print out a descrip­tion of your envi­ron­ment, and then you would type in what you wanted to do. (Here’s a mod­ern exam­ple with a polit­i­cal slant.)

Any­way, Leg­ends of Zork is fun so far, but I feel like 30 AP/day is so slow and I’m too cheap to buy coconuts to get more AP. You should check it out! Takes maybe 10 min­utes a day to play.

The nos­tal­gia is mak­ing me want to play through the orig­i­nal games again. Time to hit up the aban­don­ware sites!