I’ve seen this too, had a customer who played the nightly $100k drawing. Won it, got the cash, this was before the state withheld the taxes, spent it. New car, new clothes, more JeriCurl for his hair. (I loved Willie, but he looked like a pimp from the '70’s. The custom '76 Lincoln Continental didn’t help). The next year, 3 days before the taxes were due, he was stressed. Came in, told me his troubles, bought 1 ticket. It hit. Paid the taxes for both, walked away with $20k and as far as I know, never bought another ticket again.
Some years ago when scratchcards were first introduced into the UK my mother won £1000 with the 3rd card she bought.
She never bought another.
Right outside my office is a check cashing place that cashes welfare checks. Down the road from them is a convenience store that sells lottery tickets.
You would not believe the number of people who cash welfare checks and then use the money to buy fifty or sixty dollars worth of lottery tickets. As someone once remarked “The lottery is a tax on poor people.”
No, the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. My guess is that there is significant overlap.
flight writes:
> No, the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math.
I don’t think so. A lot of the sorts of people who constantly buy lottery tickets or who spend all of their million-dollar winnings within a few months are moderately smart (and sometimes very smart). They have no problem balancing their checkbooks or doing their taxes. Something in their heads just doesn’t let them use that mathematical ability. It’s just like how many of the people who fall for financial con games (like the Nigerian scam) actually know quite a bit about financial matters. Something in their heads prevents them from using that knowledge.
I find all the condemnation of this woman just a little hypocritical. Sure, she’s a thief, and an unrepentant one. But it’s fairly obvious that she was driven to it by some kind of compulsive-obsessive mindset – a rational person, having stolen 2 million dollars, would realize they’d done as well as someone who has won a four million dollar lottery, and keep the money, not blow it all on scratch-offs. In a society as nakedly acquisitive, money-oriented and greedy as ours, it’s absolutely predictable that some people’s minds will crumple like a piece of paper held in an open flame. But you guys can’t admit that so you shift all the blame to the woman. While she definitely shouldn’t be entrusted with money any time soon, she does seem like someone who doesn’t have all her oars in the water.
But if I were to, say, retain the server farm as my own property, and then lease it to The Chicago Reader for a reasonable annual fee …