52 dollars a year? Enough to take my family out to a baseball game. Or the movies. Enough to pay the babysitter and take the SO out for a few beers. Enough to buy me a new computer game, or a new board game or three.
:shrug: That’s much more valuable to me than the ludicrous hope of winning a quazillion-million bucks.
And, as pointed out, the difference in my chance of actually winning and yours might as well be miles apart. You have zero chance. I have a near zero chance, but it still isn’t zero and actually exists. Given that I’ve got the discretionary income to “throw away” for a little fun, I don’t see where it’s anyone else’s business to judge how I spend it. Do you?
Well, to me, the whopping $15-20 I might spend on the lottery in a year is more than paid for by the enjoyment I get from it. Your mileage may vary, and bully for you if so. You say you can take someone out for drinks… well, fabulous, but those drinks are gone the next day… just as my daydreaming ends when the numbers are drawn.
In response to the OP, CNN is reporting that the woman’s “friends” have dropped their case since the evidence showed they did not pay for the winning ticket.
What I think people are missing is that there was a "definite traceable difference between the 190 and the 20. The store’s record reflects a sale to the woman of 190 tickets – no winners – and then a sale of 20 tickets – one of which is the winner. Why would she have to go to a different store?
I agree that if she bought 210 tickets and failed to in any way segregate the “mine” from the “ours,” then she should not be able to say “oh, well, the winning one is one of ‘mine’ and not one of ‘ours’.” But that’s not the case, apparently.
I’ve actually done a lot of thinking about the lottery recently. I’ve changed my viewpoint a bit on it.
The odds are 1 in 80,089,128 that you’ll win. That’s (49!-44!)/5! * 42
When gambling, you can expect a positive expected value (+ev) in the long run when the odds of you winning are less than you will win if you win. For example, if I offered you $2 to your $1 on a coin flip, you would take it knowing you’re getting 2:1 on an even money deal. Thus, it will be, in the long run, a +ev deal.
With the lottery, there are a number of factors to consider. The amount of money in the pot, the taxes you can expect to have taken out, the cost for a lump sum payment and the odds that you’ll have to split it. In the case of $290 million, it would be close to 50% for taxes and 50% again for the lump sum option. This leaves close to 73 million. That doesn’t take into consideration the chances of it being split, which can never be accurately determined.
But still, 73 million is less than 80.1 million and so you can expect there to be a -ev in the long run no matter what.
So then, the conclusion should be never to play the lottery, right? Not exactly. There’s one thing that screws up the equation that I haven’t added yet. Consider that if you play the lottery 10 times a week, every week, for 50 years, you’ll have spent $26,000. Hell of a lot of money. But, the interesting thing about the lottery is that you merely need to win once, at ANY pot amount, and you’ll have made your money back.
Basically, what I’m saying is that I wouldn’t advocate playing the lottery. But, if you do play, you need not wait until the pot gets huge. When you lose, you’ll lose. When you win, you come out ahead no matter how much money you’ve sunk into the game. This isn’t to say that $290 million isn’t a hell of a better payday than $2.9 million, but either one is a lot more money than you will EVER spend on the lottery.
Being struck by lighting: pretty fucking rare. Ban lighting rods.
The planet getting hit by a stray asteroid or comet to cause planetwide extinction of numberous species: appalingly rare. Ban all attempts to stop such an affair.
This is ludicrous.
Lotteries basically function as a voluntary regressive tax. Most politicians love lotteries because they raise revenue and help them avert or lessen the need to make fiscal decisions that may be unpopular (i.e. raising sales or income taxes, or cutting the budget).
In fact, an analysis by the Louisville Courier-Journal concluded that the odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 709,260 as opposed to the odds of 1 in 80,089,128 that you’ll win the powerball.
You’re absolutely right don’t ask, we shouldn’t then ban it. We should simply impose a fine for installing lighting rods to discourage people from wasting money.
We should establish all sorts of Rules for poor people: no lotteries; no bingo; no radio, TV or newspapers; no sex when there is a possibility of conception; no birthday cakes; no pensions or 401ks.
What we need is a benevolent dictator who would tell us which activites should be allowed. We know better than our poorer brethren, right?
Who’s to say which dream is the dopey-ist? Lotto or the Silicon Valley geek who invests her heart/time/mind into a failing dotcom?
Get a grip, folks! A dream is a dream.
FYI: According to one news report I saw on the controversy, the lottery tickets in question were time stamped. If the lawyer running the press conference (representing, I believe, the Powerball winner) is to be believed, the time stamps show that the batch given to the coworkers was in one block, representing the exact number of tickets the winner agreed to buy and split with the coworkers. Then they have a second block of 20, the last of which was the winning ticket. The blocks are easily distinguished by these time stamps.
If true, the coworkers have no case. Why they’re proceeding if so, of course, is another thing entirely.
I’m not for banning the lottery, but I can see the damage it does. Soon after we got a lottery in Texas my brother-in-law became addicted. Every time he leaves the house he buys tickets, the floorboards of his cars are full of old scratch-offs. He cashes in a few hundred dollars worth every month, so I can only imagine how many he is buying. He works 84 hour weeks at a high-paying job yet they have trouble paying bills on a modest house in the country.
Anyway, when my mother retired her and my father moved into a tiny guest house on my sister’s property that they fixed up with a few thousand dollars I gave them last year when I got my stock options check. At the time my brother-in-law said he’d charge them $200 a month to live there, but he would count the money they spent on repairs and stuff on the little guest house (I think it was once a garage) towards that rent. My parents spent over $4000 on it, so you’d think they’d have 20 months there before they started having to pay rent. Hah.
My sister told my parents that she would give them rides to the store and stuff, since my Dad has alzheimers and my mother never could drive. My sister has plenty of time alone (when her husband isn’t working, he’s fishing) and was happy to help my parents out. Well, the car my sister drove broke down while she and my parents went on a day trip somewhere, and her husband got mad at her and had her name taken off the checking account. Her husband won’t let her take my parents anywhere in his cars because he said my parents ‘trash cars’, which is extremely fucked up, my parents are very neat people while my brother-in-law’s cars always are full of trash and he has messed up more than one vehicle my parents have lent him in the past. My parents have an old pickup with no AC that they let my sister use to drive them around and for herself, and my brother-in-law has said since we got the truck that it was a lemon, was dangerous to drive due to loose steering, and was going to break down any day now - my Dad’s had that truck 5 years now, and I think my brother-in-law was jealous that my Dad got such a good deal on it - it’s from the early '80s but has good mileage and the previous owner fixed it up a lot with a lot of chrome, custom upholstery, only thing wrong with it was the AC and the steering. Well, another of his cars broke down and he fixed the steering on the truck so his son could use it sometimes, and then later started talking about selling the truck so he could fix one of their OTHER old cars for my sister.
Anyway, I’m getting off-track, back to the lottery. One day my mother bought a couple of lottery tickets (she very rarely buys a scratch-off or two herself) and she won $200 total on the two tickets. My sister made the mistake of telling my brother-in-law about it, and the very next day he told my parents they were going to have to start paying $200 a month rent again. He also told them they needed to write to get a new copy of the title so they could sell the car when they found a buyer, and when the title got there they kept it, saying that my parents might lose it.
My Mom was now constantly worrying about their future, they feel like they are under house-arrest because my sister can only get permission to take them to the store or elsewhere every other week or so, and they were afraid that they were going to lose the truck, see none of the money, and still not be able to go anywhere. I think a lot of this is due to my brother-in-law’s addiction to the lottery, though there are a lot of other factors too. Luckily I have an awesome wife who loves my parents too, and she suggested that we move into a house this fall and let my parents move in with us. I am always checking with my parents to see if they need a ride anywhere and I gladly drive the 90 miles out there to get them to the store or wherever, and I told them to tell my brother-in-law that I reminded them that they promised me the truck and I was planning on buying it next year when I get my tax return (a lie, but after they told my brother-in-law that he went from saying he had someone lined up to buy the truck to saying that nobody was interested in the heap of junk).
Eek, sorry for the long rant, probably should have gone in the pit…just had to unload some of that.