Ontario is broke. Ontario is governed by the shittiest fucking provincial government ever, yet they keep playing lottery commercials insinuating that winning the lottery is a common occurrence.
They show people on exotic vacations, visits to distant grandmas, men out on seaside golf courses.
Fuck you Ontario. It should be illegal to advertise what amounts to voluntary taxation. Look, you’re not going to win the fucking lottery. No one you know is going to win the fucking lottery. And they prey on the poor and the immigrants who need money for other purposes like, you know food and electricity.
Fuck you. Paid advertisements for your own shitty taxation scheme is deplorable and should not be legal.
You’re not going to win the lottery. You’ll spend thousands of dollars on “playing” the lottery and at the end of the day, it’s all voluntary tax. So, cut it out and buy some food or something.
Hey, they are just doing what they know works in order to sell the tickets. The average lottery player probably doesn’t have a realistic notion of the chances and risk, so the advertising is going to take advantage of this. You gotta know your market, after all.
Advertising for gambling sites may well be the scourge of the devil.
However, I know one fellow who won $800,000 a decade or so back. He bought a fishing boat, a big TV and a truck. Stopped drinking. Been doing pretty well.
My nephew actually won $500,000 about three years ago. Bought a truck, moved cities and started an apprentice program that he’d been wanting to do.
Just the other day, ran into a former co-worker. He let me know about a mutual acquaintence that we’d both worked with. Dude spent 14 months in jail for multiple car thefts. Just won $1 million. Not sure how that’s going to work out for him but I predict he will have $0 inside of two years. Hope I’m wrong.
So I guess since I know three people who have won large prizes, I should not bother buying a ticket…
The people who can least afford it are often times the people who buy lottery tickets the most. Part of that demographic would include those who are poor/broke because they are stupid or have dysfunctional spending habits. So in this light, lottery ticket advertisements make perfect sense. Sort of like those advertisements aimed at getting people who have a structured settlement or annuity to “consolidate” there payments into one lump sum. A move like taking a lump sum is idiotic. You lose so much money this way as well as disrupt a dependable income stream. The people most likely to convert their structured payments into a lump sum are those with awful money management, as well as those who don’t fully understand the implications of such a move. It’s why the commercials are so obnoxious and stupid, they know their market.
Agreed. But our feelings on the matter are fairly irrelevant. If the people actually buying the tickets felt this way about the advertising, the companies would take notice and change them. But it works, and they don’t care what the opinions are of those who wouldn’t use their products in the first place.
Sure. But this is the government, not a private company. The government is purposely preying on low income people to convince them to buy lottery tickets in order to increase provincial revenues.
That should be illegal. I mute the commercials when they come on the TV; it sickens me. It really does.
I think there is plausible deniability in asserting that they had no intention of targeting anyone to take advantage of. “Hey, we’re just providing these people with a service they want, we can’t help it if it also attracts dysfunctional users”.
I live in an American lottery state and they promote it the same way. :rolleyes:
The one person I have known personally who won a big prize purchased a $10,000 scratch-off ticket shortly before we were all about to lose our jobs in a mass layoff. The guy who sold her the ticket also worked with us; he took the job at a gas station because his wife was pregnant and he wanted to have some guaranteed money coming in - and he got a $100 bonus for selling that ticket.
Before she could collect, they had to do a background check on her for (IIRC, in this order) delinquent taxes, child support, and unpaid student loans. She knew she was clean in all 3 departments (she paid her taxes, had no children, and hadn’t yet attended college) but they still had to do it. She had to go to the state lottery headquarters to pick up her 1099 and a check for about $7,700.
I “play” the lottery once a year, at Christmastime when my parents put some tickets in my stocking. I may win a $2 or $5 prize, and they have cash handy for this purpose.
Interestingly, the OLG breaks down the demographics pretty transparently. It’s decidely not just poor people and uneducated people that play, but a pretty good mix overall, and (without doing an in-depth analysis), it looks like people with more money tend to play more.
There’s a big caveat, though: the data show players and non-players, but doesn’t indicate purchase volume. So it could be that “educated players” purchase one ticket, whereas “poor, uneducated players” are spending $60 on tickets.
It appears that profits from OLG games don’t appear to be earmarked for a specific purpose, so I guess the government of Ontario can do whatever it feels with the funds, as opposed to here in Michigan, where it’s earmarked for education (although only about 35% of the proceeds are given back).
I dunno. I’m 59. If I won a mega million jackpot (hypothetically, as I don’t play) I’d take the lump sum and attempt to blow it. Max out gifts to my kids, light cigars with Benjamins, replace my Irish Spring after each shower, etc.
Judging from some of the riffraff taking up time and space in front of me in any place that sells these things, buying six different kinds of lottery tickets at a time and carefully getting a big pile of their old ones checked out and just generally making an enormous time-wasting production out of the whole thing – and judging by how frequently that happens – I’d say it’s more than plausible that the poor and uneducated buy them in bulk. They’re what OLG euphemistically likes to refer to as “core lottery players” – i.e.- gambling addicts who are very bad at math.
Dave Barry once wrote a column about how gambling was once illegal on the basis that it preyed on the poor and the stupid and deprived them of money they could ill afford to lose, but once government got into the lottery business there was a miraculous transformation. The government-owned lottery corporations started running ads implying that the poor and stupid could make no better investment than to buy lottery tickets by the bucketful! The hypocrisy is really quite stunning.
I’m sure we all have some sort of anecdote to share about someone who won the lottery, but that’s just the six degrees of separation thing – we have such an enormous number of superficial direct and indirect contacts that there are bound to be examples of the extremely improbable. A former co-worker of mine had once in the past won $50,000. Back when I owned a sailboat, one of the particularly large boats in the marina was owned by a former owner of a smallish one who was always bitching about not being able to afford its upkeep. This all got resolved when he hit a $25 million jackpot. But it’s not going to happen to you, or me. I object to the ad slogan “you can’t win if you don’t play”. First of all, in any practical sense you can’t win whether you play or not. In theory, of course, you can, and that remains true even if you don’t play – someone could give you a winning ticket, or one could come flying in through your window. The odds of any of those things happening are about the same in that they are all sufficiently close to zero to not merit further scrutiny.
I agree with your sentiment in general, but, if you think about it, there’s a surprisingly good chance you will know someone who wins a fairly big lottery jackpot.
They hand out a LOT of these things. There are literally hundreds of jackpots every year; 104 nationwide Lotto 649 jackpots, 52 nationwide Lotto Max jackpots, and 104 Grand A Day jackpots, and that’s just the ones I remember. Ontario hands out 104 Ontario 49 jackpots a year. (I know there isn’t a winner every time,. but that’s offset by the fact that many jackpots have multiple winners, plus there are sub-prizes of a million dollars handed out, sometimes a dozen or more a week. Then you have scratch tickets, some of which have very large prizes. So it’s fair to say hundreds of people a year win lotteries, and over the last ten years it’s thousands. It’s gotta be even money you’ll know SOMEONE, albeit perhaps not a close relative or friend, who hits a jackpot.
Having said that I think the point is being missed just a bit. It’s not the POOR who are the victims of the state lottery scam… that’s a common thing to say because it confers a sense of superiority, but where the government is really hurting people are ADDICTS. Gambling addicts come in all descriptions and income levels. I have mentioned it before but I have a friend - not a poor person, but an educated professional - who figures he lost roughly $75,000 to his scratch ticket addiction before he got into Gamblers Anonymous. $75,000 on scratch tickets! Stories og gambling addiction ruining lives are legion now. The casinos are filled to the brim with addicts. Some poor, some rich, most middle class.
Wait one second. Why on Earth would anybody buy a fishing boat and then give up drinking? The entire point of having a fishing boat is to have a place to drink. Without beer, you’d be forced to fish or something.
That’s true, but as I just noted above, it’s also surprising how many people you “know” if you include direct and indirect contacts no matter how superficial. It doesn’t change the odds, of course. If you limit the cohort to people you know personally and are actually close to, rather than a friend’s uncle’s acquaintance that he met once, the number of jackpot winners rapidly dwindles to zero. I’m sure that many of what OLG calls “core players” are genuinely mystified about why they’ve never won, and feel that they’re having a run of unusual bad luck. I myself once won $5 (but I almost never buy lottery tickets).
BTW, on the subject of the introductory sentences in the OP, Ontario isn’t broke, and the pontification about the present government is political opinion, and hyperbolic at that. I realize that both Wynne and her party are currently rock-bottom in the polls, but a lot of that is baggage from the missteps of her predecessor who was a lying opportunist and from a decade and a half of power that led, frankly, to a bit too much complacency. It’s not a political shift as the Liberals are losing support both to Conservatives on the right and to the NDP on the left.