Some people think the claw machine is so hard to win because the stuffed animals are packed so tightly together. But the bigger reason is more insidious than that: the claw machine is programmed to have a strong grip only part of the time.
This isn’t a closely kept secret. It’s publicly available information, pulled straight from the instruction guides for the biggest claw games out there. Open the manual for Black Tie Toys’ Advanced Crane Machine. Look at page eight, section subheading “Claw Strength”:
The machine’s owner can fine-tune the strength of the claw beforehand so that it only has a strong grip a fraction of the time that people play.
The owner can manually adjust the “dropping skill,” as well. That means that on a given number of tries, the claw will drop a prize that it’s grabbed before it delivers it to you.
.. The machines also allow the owner to select a desired level of profit and then automatically adjust the claw strength to make sure that players are only winning a limited number of times:
The indictment alleges that at least a hundred and fifty million dollars in bribes changed hands—and that number is just a starting point. It doesn’t even really get to Qatar’s now notorious bid for the 2022 tournament. There are now criminal investigations or serious questions about every men’s World Cup from the past two decades.
.. The division between soccer’s ideals and its realities is perhaps best exemplified by the surface on which the women will be playing in this month’s supposed world-class event: artificial turf, rather than grass. That would be unheard of in men’s games at anything approaching this level. Turf increases the likelihood of injuries, including career-ending ones. It makes dives and tackles inadvisable. It renders play choppy and poorly paced, by increasing the number of times that the ball bounces out of play.
.. on Friday, Die Zeit reported that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder allegedly approved an arms sale to Saudi Arabia as part of the price for buying the kingdom’s vote to give Germany the 2006 tournament)
.. A few years ago, Blatter suggested that the way to encourage the sport’s development would be to have the women wear tight shorts.
.. To keep players from keeling over from the heat, the 2022 World Cup will be held in November and December, which will wreak havoc with the players’ professional schedules. Even at that time of year, temperatures are in the eighties, and so the plan is for the games to be played in air-conditioned stadiums that are currently being built in the desert by migrant workers who have few rights and who labor under conditions that are, as the BBC put it, “appalling.”
Next year it will surpass China, becoming the world’s fastest-growing emerging market. Its international position has improved too, with Modi’s vigorous diplomacy earning him a place alongside China’s Xi Jinping and Shinzo Abe of Japan in a new troika of strongman Asian nationalists whose interplay will define the continent’s future.
.. But India has also suffered from a wider and equally depressing interplay between politics and criminality, in which those with links to illegal activity have sought elected office, often simply to protect their business affairs. Around one third of the members of India’s parliament now have criminal cases pending against them.
.. India’s vast election are notoriously expensive—one estimate suggested that last year’s poll cost political parties in the region of $5bn. Almost all of this is given covertly, the majority from wealthy businesses.
.. Losses to the public purse were easier to calculate, however. On coal, for instance, Rai produced a report in 2012 estimating that India could have raised more than $30bn, had it auctioned mining rights, rather than gifting them to the private sector.
.. Many of these figures and those working for them prospered in what Harvard academic Michael Walton describes as “rent thick” sectors of India’s economy such as real estate, infrastructure or mining—meaning those in which income (or “rent”) often comes via influence-peddling, rather than fair competition.
.. India probably now has a higher proportion of national wealth in the hands of its billionaire class than any other major emerging economy, with the exception of Russia.
.. the country’s system of agricultural support allows nearly $5bn worth of food grains to rot in government warehouses each year, while also encouraging widespread graft.
.. Modi’s main aim is to get India’s economy moving, an area where picking fights with industrialists, for instance, could prove disruptive, in the short term at least. Yet the suspicion remains that Modi’s caution stems from an unwillingness to disturb powerful, entrenched interests. Put more simply, India’s Prime Minister wants to win re-election in 2019, in what is certain to be the most expensive campaign in Indian history. That will require money. Lots of money. Any action that might affect political funding, in particular, is likely to be avoided.
.. India is the world’s largest democracy, and perhaps its most unlikely. No country has sustained democratic rule while being as poor.