Some people say that lotteries are a tax on stupidity. I don’t think it’s that well defined. They’re a tax on dreams or stupidity. If somebody on welfare is buying lottery tickets instead of food, they’re a tax on stupidity. If somebody has some spare cash, would not be caused any problems if they threw away a few $, and buys lottery tickets, they’re a tax on dreams.
Yes, I look at it exactly this way. A particularly fun game you can play is “What would I do on the first day after I won?” What you’d tell your boss, purchases you would make, etc. Dang, I’m starting to fantasize already and I don’t even have a ticket. Maybe I’ll have to pick up one of the $26,000,000 Texas lotto tickets at lunch.
Although every time I am tempted to do so, I remember this visual analogy: winning the lottery is like trying to pick the right single sheet of paper out of a stack that’s 5 miles high.*
*no cite
Yeah…just use it for the fun, what-the-hell, dream for a buck. Spending anything more than that is stupid.
Still, someone has to win, and I personally know a guy in Germany who won the lottery. He bought a condo, a printing business with his partner which eventully failed, and he bought a big-ass expensive car that he drove for many years. He took a lot of vacations, bought lots of rounds of drinks for friends, had some nice watches and clothes. But all he has left now is the condo, which is actually very nice and the smartest thing he bought.
So, someone has to win, and for a buck, you can at least spend a few minutes imagining yourself as the winner while you boss is asking you to data entry that box of records by tomorrow afternoon.
I see purchasing a lottery ticket as only slightly improving my one and a gazillion chance of winning. It’s worth more for it’s entertainment value. But I still buy them. Well, at least I used to.
I can’t win the lottery. The ad agency I work for has the Minnesota State Lottery as a client. So to avoid the appearance of impropriety, nobody I work with can win the lottery. I did buy a few weeks worth of tickets when I was in Chicago for work. Just to get my fix.
Not true. Someone has to win eventually*, but no one has to win a particular drawing.
*perhaps not strictly true, but close enough.
Not trying to be overly PC here, but I’d prefer to think it’s a tax on people who are bad at math.
I know perfectly sane people (present company included) who KNOW they’ll never win, but play on occasion cause, hey, 2/3rds of 110mill would ROCK!
Fair enough.
I’ll pad this reply with my standard lottery debunker. Imagine a 1% chance at winning. How likely is it to win a 1% chance drawing? Any RPG’er will tell you the odds aren’t good.
Now consider the lottery. You can put 5 sets of numbers on a ticket. So if you buy a full $5 five-entry ticket every single lottery, without fail, you will have reached an aggregate 1% chance to have won in a mere 1500 years. Good luck.
There is no real distinction between buying a ticket and not buying a ticket. The odds of walking down the street and having a winning lottery ticket, carried by the wind, land in your hand are fairly close to the odds of buying a winning ticket straight up.
So you can still do the fantasizing thing with just as legitimate a chance to win it all even if you don’t buy a ticket.
True
Not true. An infinitesmal is not repeat not the same thing as zero. If it were I don’t think it would be possible to form dy/dx.
But it isn’t zero. An unknown person could will a winning ticket to you. Or the wind could carry the winning ticket into your hand, as I mentioned before. Or you could be walking down the street and just see it sitting there. The chance is not zero. The infinitesimal chance is statistically indistinguishable from the buying a ticket chance, and both are most assuredly not zero.
If the lottery is truly random, you have an equal chance to win with any six numbers.
Your ‘pattern recognition’ is not relevant here.
The only difference is the size of the win - here Colophon made the useful point that you might as well pick numbers that are not ‘popular’ choices, since then you will share the same total with less people.
As for entering, I personally agree with posters who have said that this is a poor idea (e.g. the UK lottery only gives back 50% of entry fees as prizes), but as long as you use only money you can afford to lose, that’s your free choice.
Which of those points aren’t implied in the OP, glee? 
I’m not able to do the math but I think you are mistaken. First, you’d have to consider the odds of a lottery ticket-- ANY lottery ticket blowing right into your hand. That’s gotta been astromical right there.
And, if it’s blowing around on the street, odds are that it was a losing ticket from a previous drawing that someone threw away. So that reduces your chances a great deal more. Now, even if the one in maybe 1,000,000,000,000 chance a ticket lands in your hand (has it ever happened to anyone? At least people have actually won lotteries before) it’s probably expired. Even if it’s not, you still have to face the already loooong odds that it is a winner.
So, there is in fact a VERY real distinction, odds-wise, of buying and not buying a ticket.
“You can’t win if you don’t play” seems to hold up pretty well to me (logically speaking).
I think it depends on what state. Georgia apparently does it pretty well. The lottery paid for my boyfriend’s college education, as I understand it.
http://www.galottery.com/gen/education/hopeScholarship.jsp?focus=education
Those who are reading my posts know I am in Bulgaria right now. Just a frame of reference so you understand the weird dream I had last night. After reading this thread I dreamt that I bought a ticket in the “Bulgarian lottery” at a ticket stand for the metro, and it gave me the numbers “0 0 0 0 0 0”. I’m sure Freud could write a book on that. Regardless of Freud, in my dream I won the lottery (I forget how much), but as a foreign citizen I could not collect any winnings. Furthermore, it was illegal for foreigners to buy lottery tickets, and I got deported. The dream just got stranger from there, but i’ll spare you.
I just thought it amusing that SMDB threads are now inspiring my weird dreams. As long as the voices don’t start talking about 1920’s style death rays… 
I posted:
“If the lottery is truly random, you have an equal chance to win with any six numbers.
Your ‘pattern recognition’ is not relevant here.”
Read the title of the thread. :rolleyes:
I posted:
“the UK lottery only gives back 50% of entry fees as prizes.”
I think you’ll find this fact is not only not implied, but not mentioned at all in the OP. In fact.
My daughter is attending the University of Central Florida with a Bright Futures scholarship - paid by lottery funds. She’s got 100% tuition, plus $300 per semester for expenses. So I feel like the coupla hundred dollars I spent on tickets over the years paid off for us. I don’t think her degree in education will be fluff - she wants to teach elementary school.
Does it say Quick Pick on the ticket? If so, a losing lottery ticket with consecutive numbers, picked by the machine, might be worth something to a collector on eBay. Give it a shot – you might at least get your buck back. 