Well, I suppose you could get a raise, they can’t.
Over 90% of the price of cigarettes in Spain is taxes. And back when the only company that could sell tobacco was Tabacalera, it was government-owned…
One of the things I dislike about working in Spain is the Christmas lottery. Eeeeeeevery single company buys company tickets. Eeeeeevery store, bar, sports association, fan club buys group tickets. Stores give away tickets (based on the amount you purchased) for a “Christmas basket,” whomever got the same number that won the national lottery gets the basket of food goodies. Parishes do the same, but they charge you for the tickets (it’s for charity!). And of course the line everybody uses is “but, what if it wins and you’re the only one who didn’t buy it?”
And the thing is, it’s the one prize that’s “traditional” and which has fame outside our borders, but it isn’t even that big!
I play lottery sometimes, on a whim (biggest win, 15000 pta on a private-lottery ticket which had cost 100pta). But I like doing it on a whim, not because everybody spends a month nagging me to do it 
First off, thanks to flight for the welcome. I’ll respond to your post in a bit, though perhaps I should wait for your follow-up on insurance. For now, I’ll just give a small response to SenorBeef’s.
Fair enough. I did mention that risk-aversion was one good reason to buy insurance. It seems a little odd, though, to me, to believe that risk-aversion is rational but risk-taking is necessarily irrational (the very standard wording, of course, works against me. One must keep in mind that risk-aversion is reward-aversion and risk-taking is reward-seeking).
Well, sure, not buying a lottery ticket will never be detrimental to your life, except in terms of opportunity cost when compared to the possible huge beneficial effect you are turning your back on. People aren’t playing the lottery out of fear of the consequences if they don’t, they’re playing out of hope for the consequences if they do. I don’t know why it matters that the lottery is a luxury; you can happily get away with not playing it, sure, but you’re giving up something in so doing, something which you might actually want. And if you don’t think people should want the rewards so badly, I think there’s a burden which falls upon you to demonstrate why they shouldn’t.
Yeah, like I said, I have my doubts about the very meaningfulness of cardinal utility/talk of happiness ratios/etc., but it’s a useful approximation to the uncontroversial actual facts, that a gamble changes from an undesirable one to a desirable one at some level of increase in the desirability of the rewards.
Certainly. I thought this was an interesting and insightful point for you to bring up last time, and conceded it as your best point of attack on the rationality of lottery players. Though, for me to really buy it in full generality, and agree with condemnation of lottery players, I’d need to see it more fleshed out as to just why the happiness valuations necessary are irrational.
Yes, I do, most of my arguments have been in support of this (though see below for my updated viewpoint). Because whether the lottery has losing value or winning value is very much dependent on how you measure value, as illustrated before with the happiness vs. money thing. What’s true is that if you keep playing the lottery forever, probability approaches 1 for it not having been a net positive for you, but this, like I said, holds true of insurance as well, in the sense that it too has negative expected monetary value which will come to dominate in the long run. So this probabilistic long-term analysis doesn’t seem to be enough for condemnation of the lottery, since it doesn’t differentiate between the lottery and insurance.
Yeah, this would be getting a thrill from risk-seeking behavior, which I saw as the dual to finding insurance useful for its risk-reduction. When I say I’d like to argue that the lottery could be rational even without entertainment value, I mean purely on the risks and rewards alone, which (though I think I may not have been fully aware of this myself as I was writing out previous arguments) includes the ability to account for risk-seeking and risk-aversion, since they are parts of the risks and rewards. I was thinking this “risks and rewards basis alone” approach was throwing out the ability to consider benefits from fantasizing and “entertainment value”. Though, now, as I ponder it, the ability to fantasize is really just something that arises from the risks and rewards anyway, as is the “entertainment value”, in a way. So I’m not sure the distinction is so important anymore. But, at any rate, my viewpoint is that one could soberly, knowingly, rationally choose to play the lottery specifically because of its particular risks and rewards, without having to harbor any delusions about the exact numbers involved, or be unable to get a proper perspective on them.
I basically responded to this above, but you seem to think it important enough to repeat, so I’ll repeat the gist of my response. You aren’t gonna die from not playing the lottery, but you’ll live a boring life if you only act to avoid death. There’s the opportunity cost of what you give up, which can be significant.
You certainly did clear it up, thanks. It’s all about variance-reduction. But what’s intrinsically good about risk-and-reward-aversion and intrinsically bad about risky reward-seeking?
I’m not sure why you can leap to these conclusions. What’s inherent about poor people being the most common lottery players that allows you to infer that they’re probably not playing rationally, or that even though the lottery might provide happiness for them, a fancy dinner would be even happier? (I suppose being poor is itself some sort of evidence of poor financial skills…, is that it?) When people toss around blanket assertions like “Most people play the lottery without really understanding the costs and chances”, I want to ask “Cite?”.
Well, I outlined a risk-aversion based argument for diversification, and thus for not buying lots of tickets. [I had typed a long thing here about the paradox of decision theory that individually rational one-shot games can be strung into a clearly irrational infinite chain, and described the problem as perhaps a soritical situation, where each new ticket purchase is itself reasonable, though eventually the combined result is somehow unreasonable compared to the start, but deleted it, for fear it would only lead to embarrassment as way too head-in-the-clouds theoretical about this.] But I should say it’s not important to me that the second ticket have the same desirability as the first; I had said it would, if the player were employing purely expected value based reasoning, instead of some more subtle analysis of risks and rewards, but since I don’t really care for purely expected value based reasoning, it’s not important to me that the second be as desirable as the first.
Don’t think of it as giving up expectation, because expectation is a very poor, scale-dependent measure (happiness vs. money again). Depending on what you’re looking at, they might actually be gaining expectation. And the value isn’t purely in the variance, per se (since there are some variance increases [negative payout lotteries, say] which they’d surely turn down), but in some sort of analysis of risks and rewards which may occasionally happen to favor risk-taking.
It’s not necessarily the case that buying more tickets reduces variance. Obviously, when you’ve bought them all, you’ve reduced variance down to 0. And when you’ve bought none, variance is also at 0. So it rises and then falls in the middle, but not necessarily with the peak at 1 ticket. We can measure variance in a million different ways (standard deviation, VARIANCE variance [standard deviation squared], various schemes based off of Shannon entropy, etc.), and depending on how you measured it, the peak would be at a different number of tickets. But, even disregarding all that, like I said, the lottery player isn’t playing purely to increase variance, but just has some method of evaluating risks and rewards in mind, which needn’t be just the “Look at the expected monetary value” method. The method they have in mind could favor buying 8 tickets but not 9, who knows? I just don’t think the method has to be the “Look at the expected monetary value, and maybe also apply some risk-aversion” method to be considered rational, and that there’s room for rational analysis of risks and rewards that condones buying several tickets regularly.
It’s not really logical to drink a flavored beverage (soda) when water is available. I don’t get irrationally pissed off at the cola drinkers ahead of me in line.
It’s not really logical to drink any type of alcoholic beverage at all since our perceptions are changed by alcohol. I don’t grumble in line behind the beer or wine buyer in the supermarket.
I don’t understand the real dislike of lottery players. It’s fun to dream - maybe not at all logical, but it’s fun. Why all the anger?
I think that’s the most sensible thing I’ve seen in the entire thread.
And I’m well aware of the fact that my anger has basically prevented me from saying the same thing even though this is exactly how I feel.
And all I drink is water. All you pop drinkers disgust me. 
But they don’t hold up the line for a long ass time. That is my gripe with lotto players.