# Fuck you lottery Ontario commercials. **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [June 20, 2017, 1:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410 "2017-06-20T01:45:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Spiderman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spiderman/32/230_2.png) [@Spiderman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spiderman)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/21 "2017-06-20T16:38:41Z")
You think those are bad, look at the PA lottery commercials. Go over to youtube & search, “Gus, the second most famous groundhog”. His tagline is, “Keep on scratchin’” It’s true, too. Every time one of those @#$%&\* commercials comes on, I wanna scratch my eyes & ears out! I don’t think I’ve ever bought a scratch-off lottery ticket. Even the best games are something like 500:1 odds & then you only win $500. That won’t even cover round trip airfares somewhere. I will occasionally buy one of the two big ones when they get up to change-your-family’s-life levels, like kids, grandkids, & great-grandkids will never need to work in their life as they can live off the investments. My expenditure for the year is usually less than the cost of a movie ticket (w/o popcorn). Hey, lightning could strike! > [@Ambivalid](#): > > 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. Why are they so bad? I thought the lottery lump sum payout was somewhere in the 60% range - get $1 million @ $50m / year over the next 20 years or $600m today. Decently invested, you’d end up with the same amount. Yeah, most people won’t invest it instead go out & buy stuff. However, if that stuff gives them joy is it such a bad deal? I always assumed that if you called them up they offer you something like 40-50% lump sum payout, making a cool $100-200m. Do they offer even less than that? ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/22 "2017-06-20T17:12:12Z")
Oh sure, lottery ads just incite the vulnerable, but ya gotta raise that revenue, eh? FWIW when the jackpot gets real big I’ll grab one ticket just for the fun of thinking of all the “adios, suckers” moves I could come up with once I retained some really goid lawyers… ---
**Author:** ![velomont](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/8491ac/32.png) [@velomont](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/velomont)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/23 "2017-06-20T17:25:04Z")
The whole lottery thing is appalling IMO. Twenty years ago I was posted to Canadian Forces Base Borden but my wife was still in Ottawa, so I regularly drove between them through a series of (I apologize in advance) one-horse town/redneck centrals. I stopped for gas once at a little place called McArthurs Mills and taped to the counter they had a petition. A petition for a new library perhaps? A public health nurse? School supplies? Oh no. They had a petition for a 6/49 machine. Another time I was in a convenience store in Angus, adjacent to the base (the joke, btw, is that if you remove the letter G from the name “Angus”, you will get an accurate description of the town) and there was this lowlife mother telling her kid to shut-up and sit on the floor while she played her Nevada tickets. And it was in the greeting card section of an Angus pharmacy that I discovered that there were special birthday cards with internal flaps in case you wanted to give someone a lottery ticket for their birthday. One of my high school math teachers used to refer to lotteries as Canada’s stupidity tax. ---
**Author:** ![Buck\_Godot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/buck_godot/32/6573_2.png) [@Buck\_Godot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buck_Godot)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/24 "2017-06-20T17:36:17Z")
> [@Euphonious\_Polemic](#): > > Here is my Lotto 649 strategy; > > 1. Buy a single ticket. > 2. Don’t check the numbers. > 3. Keep ticket in wallet. > 4. For months and months, imagine that you MIGHT be a winner. > 5. Just before the ticket is due to expire (one year), check numbers > 6. Go back to step 1. > > I get ONE FULL YEAR of enjoyment out of that single ticket. That’s my wife’s strategy, although she probably buys about 3-4 tickets a year keeps it posted to the refrigerator and usually forgets step 5. My strategy is to compare each days numbers to the digits of pi and every time they fail to come up credit myself with winning a dollar. ---
**Author:** ![Buck\_Godot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/buck_godot/32/6573_2.png) [@Buck\_Godot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buck_Godot)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 6:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/25 "2017-06-20T18:07:55Z")
> [@Spiderman](#): > > Why are they so bad? I thought the lottery lump sum payout was somewhere in the 60% range - get $1 million @ $50m / year over the next 20 years or $600m today. Decently invested, you’d end up with the same amount. Yeah, most people won’t invest it instead go out & buy stuff. However, if that stuff gives them joy is it such a bad deal? The problem is that by definition most of the people who buy masses of lottery tickets aren’t very good at personal finance. When they’ve been on food stamps and suddenly have a million dollars, it seems like such an unimaginably large amount of money that they consider it limitless. In the end [70% of big lottery winners end up bankrupt](http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2016/01/why_do_70_percent_of_lottery_w.html) in a few years. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Pig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c57346/32.png) [@Little\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Pig)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/26 "2017-06-20T18:54:23Z")
Powerball, Mega Millions Lotto is pulling out of Illinois because, among other issues like the state having no budget, the company tasked with running the lottery — Northstar Lottery Group — [**failed to award more than 40 percent of the grand prizes**](http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-illinois-lottery-powerball-megamillions-met-20170615-story.html) in its biggest instant ticket games, sometimes ending games before any top prizes were claimed. Nothing like funking the running of a lottery. Maybe you’ll have better luck playing the [Illinois Medicaid](https://www.illinois.gov/hfs/Pages/default.aspx) game. ---
**Author:** ![Ambivalid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a5b964/32.png) [@Ambivalid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ambivalid)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/27 "2017-06-20T18:56:15Z")
> [@Spiderman](#): > > You think those are bad, look at the PA lottery commercials. Go over to youtube & search, “Gus, the second most famous groundhog”. > > His tagline is, “Keep on scratchin’” It’s true, too. Every time one of those @#$%&\* commercials comes on, I wanna scratch my eyes & ears out! > I don’t think I’ve ever bought a scratch-off lottery ticket. Even the best games are something like 500:1 odds & then you only win $500. That won’t even cover round trip airfares somewhere. > I will occasionally buy one of the two big ones when they get up to change-your-family’s-life levels, like kids, grandkids, & great-grandkids will never need to work in their life as they can live off the investments. My expenditure for the year is usually less than the cost of a movie ticket (w/o popcorn). Hey, lightning could strike! > > Why are they so bad? I thought the lottery lump sum payout was somewhere in the 60% range - get $1 million @ $50m / year over the next 20 years or $600m today. Decently invested, you’d end up with the same amount. Yeah, most people won’t invest it instead go out & buy stuff. However, if that stuff gives them joy is it such a bad deal? I always assumed that if you called them up they offer you something like 40-50% lump sum payout, making a cool $100-200m. Do they offer even less than that? No, I was making a comparison between the marketing strategies of the lottery with those of structured settlement consolidating. I wasn’t talking about a _lottery_ lump sum. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/28 "2017-06-20T20:09:00Z")
> [@Ambivalid](#): > > No, I was making a comparison between the marketing strategies of the lottery with those of structured settlement consolidating. I wasn’t talking about a _lottery_ lump sum. Although, now that you mention it, one redeeming feature of the Canadian lottery scams is that the full face value is paid out as a lump sum, and furthermore it’s all tax free. If you win a $25M jackpot, you actually get a check for that full amount. Beyond that, it’s still a scam because the odds of winning are essentially non-existent. Well, OK, I won $5 once! 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Skywatcher](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skywatcher/32/254_2.png) [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/29 "2017-06-20T20:13:21Z")
Does Ontario even have enough money to pay out lottery winnings? Illinois is so broke that they cannot pay out any significant amount and at least one multi-state lottery has threatened to pull out of the state until they pass a budget. ---
**Author:** ![Declan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ecae2f/32.png) [@Declan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Declan)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/30 "2017-06-20T21:17:58Z")
> [@RadioWave](#): > > 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. Drinking might have been a coping mechanism for work, once work is removed, Alcohol is no longer a solution. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/31 "2017-06-20T21:19:26Z")
> [@Leaffan](#): > > Look, you’re not going to win the fucking lottery. No one you know is going to win the fucking lottery. > [@Euphonious\_Polemic](#): > > 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. Well… ---
**Author:** ![Declan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ecae2f/32.png) [@Declan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Declan)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/32 "2017-06-20T21:22:25Z")
> [@velomont](#): > > Another time I was in a convenience store in Angus, adjacent to the base (the joke, btw, is that if you remove the letter G from the name “Angus”, you will get an accurate description of the town) and there was this lowlife mother telling her kid to shut-up and sit on the floor while she played her Nevada tickets. We just say the g is silent when refering to Angus, same as saying seagulls fly upside down in Keswick. ---
**Author:** ![Whiskey\_Dickens](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/9fc348/32.png) [@Whiskey\_Dickens](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whiskey_Dickens)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/33 "2017-06-20T21:33:27Z")
Let me guess, the OP also loudly blames Premier Wynne for basically everything wrong in their life. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Ambivalid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a5b964/32.png) [@Ambivalid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ambivalid)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/34 "2017-06-20T22:02:40Z")
> [@Declan](#): > > Drinking might have been a coping mechanism for work, once work is removed, Alcohol is no longer a solution. Obligatory quote from Homer Simpson: “Ahh alcohol. The cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.” 😛 ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/35 "2017-06-20T22:24:07Z")
I assumed the OP meant you don’t know anyone who won the lottery well enough that they will give you a slice or that you particularly care about their wellbeing. ---
**Author:** ![Spoons](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spoons/32/3141_2.png) [@Spoons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoons)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/36 "2017-06-20T22:31:03Z")
> [@Declan](#): > > We just say the g is silent when refering to Angus… A friend who was stationed at CFB Borden back in the early '80s used to call it “Anguish,” but that may have just been him being polite around his parents. ---
**Author:** ![SpoilerVirgin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/4491bb/32.png) [@SpoilerVirgin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SpoilerVirgin)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2017, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/37 "2017-06-20T22:45:41Z")
> [@nearwildheaven](#): > > 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. Hey, if you’re in California, I wrote that law about child support. I was working for the state legislature when the lottery initiative was passed, and after some deadbeat who owed child support won the big prize, I helped put together a measure to require that background check before you could receive the money. I did, however, personally vote against the lottery measure, and was very sorry that it passed. At least I helped some kids get their back child support. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2017, 5:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/38 "2017-06-21T05:22:43Z")
Awesome, SpoilerVirgin! ---
**Author:** ![Whiskey\_Dickens](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/9fc348/32.png) [@Whiskey\_Dickens](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whiskey_Dickens)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2017, 1:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/39 "2017-06-21T13:22:48Z")
> [@SpoilerVirgin](#): > > Hey, if you’re in California, I wrote that law about child support. I was working for the state legislature when the lottery initiative was passed, and after some deadbeat who owed child support won the big prize, I helped put together a measure to require that background check before you could receive the money. > > I did, however, personally vote against the lottery measure, and was very sorry that it passed. At least I helped some kids get their back child support. What, what? You voted against legislation you helped write? ---
**Author:** ![SpoilerVirgin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/4491bb/32.png) [@SpoilerVirgin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SpoilerVirgin)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2017, 5:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410/40 "2017-06-21T17:45:54Z")
> [@Whiskey\_Dickens](#): > > What, what? You voted against legislation you helped write? I was for it before I was against it. 😉 No, there was a California initiative (voted on by the public, rather than the legislature), to create the lottery. I felt, and still feel, that the lottery is a tax on the poor and innumerate, and voted against that measure. I was extremely disappointed when it passed. Within a year of the establishment of the lottery, a gentleman in Southern California won a big prize. It turned out that this gentleman owed substantial child support, but at the time, the only recourse was for his ex-wife to hire a lawyer and try to sue him to recover some of the money. The state legislator for whom I worked at the time wanted to introduce a measure to prevent this situation from occurring again. The law already established that back taxes owed would be taken out of your lottery winnings before they were paid to you. I helped to create and present to committee a measure that would apply this same process to back child support. The measure was passed and signed and is still the law in California. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fuck-you-lottery-ontario-commercials/789410.md?page=3)