OT maybe a tax on stupid people....but

I bought ten mega million lottery tickets today.

1:300 million chance of winning. payout 1.6 billion.

WTF would I ever do with that much money?

George H.

Reply to
George Herold
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Invite Bill Gates to tea?

Mike.

Reply to
Mike Coon

give it to me.

Reply to
sdy

can't win if you don't play.

Reply to
sdy

It's inherit-a-great-misfortune level money. Not interested. I bought a couple of the smallest payout local lottery tickets for the same day instead, probably about $2-3 million after taxes.

I'll quietly slip off to Barbados with my winnings while everyone is distracted.

Reply to
bitrex

I'd rather donate that $20USD ticket money ($2/ticket) to Doctors Without Borders - at least then I know it is being well used.

And I figured most people here understood statistics and probabilities.

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John :-#(#

Reply to
John Robertson

But losing is a lot more likely. At those odds you'd need to have the chance to win at least 6 trillion to make it a good bet.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Sure, it doesn't make much sense to play the lottery _regularly_ your expected value of payoff will always be severely negative as time goes to infinity.

There's an opportunity cost to _not_ playing at all, however, as an ironclad policy. What it is depends on how much intrinsic value you ascribe to the potential of winning some large sum of money. It may be a very small chance but it's not identically zero, whatever it is. That is to say by playing at all, on large jackpots, you've increased the domain of "uncertainty" of your lifetime wealth by a huge amount in a way that's more-or-less impossible to do otherwise. That surely has some intrinsic value but it's hard to put a precise dollar value figure on it.

That is to say there is in fact external value associated with the jump from identically 0 to infinitesimally small not reflected in strict expected-value calculation

Reply to
bitrex

The other side of that calculation is that you could be hit by bus and killed before you even had a chance to collect.

Nobody much fantasises about that.

In that sense the lottery ticket business isn't the commercial sale of a small chance to win a lot of money, but rather a branch of the entertainment industry where you buy a license to fantasise about winning a lot of money.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Such wisdom is often found in Country and Western songs. This one pretty much sums it up :-)

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--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

Oh sorry 1:300 M is the chance of one ticket winning, my odds are an order of magnitude better. :^) GH

Reply to
George Herold

I've got a boat, only a minivan to pull it... 4WD at least. (It's a small boat.) I am totally white trash. There's no trash pick-up here... and metal bit's tend to pile up.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

I haven't bought a lottery ticket in years. It was fun... I told everyone at work too. I imagine the fun decreases exponentially.

At the local taverns, people gamble regularly.

Hey if I win I could fund some cool research project. :^)

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

bits (with apologies to apostrophe police) GH

Reply to
George Herold

The chances are dying are 1:1.

YOUR odds of dying in any single day are something like 1/200,000 (or worse) - is the lottery is looking like a bad investment yet? Not bloody likely you will live to collect, unless you buy at least 1500 tickets then your chances are perhaps even that you die the day you win.

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I still say donating to a charity makes more sense, and does more for you and the rest of us.

John ;-#)#

Reply to
John Robertson

The largest dollar-value item I recall ever winning in a game of chance was in the late 1980s, Nintendo of America had outgrown it's monthly "Nintendo Fun Club" little ~10 page newsletter and was switching over to a larger tabloid format slick, glossy production appropriate to its growth at the time.

All former subscribers of the old magazine who subscribed to the new one were entered in a drawing for one of a hundred different Nintendo game cartridges they were giving away and I was one of the winners, of an apparently big-in-Japan title called "Legendary Wings":

probably about a $70 value with inflation

8 bit NES systems were already wildly popular at that time in the US I expect my chances of winning even one of those weren't much better than 1 in 250.
Reply to
bitrex

For 5 tickets it's 61 millon to 1, so 10 tickets would be better odds.

Cheers

Reply to
Martin Riddle

Wrong. They wouldn't be running it if it were a good bet. Unless, of course, the organisers could rely on getting back most of the $1.6 billion in taxes before it ever got to the winner.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

:-)

I am not picky with spelling and grammar but it makes my toe nails curl when native speakers write "You're position is a bit off" or "Your correct on that". Maybe because I grew up in another country and the English teachers there were picky about this stuff.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

So here's my question Bill; Why do you pretend to have knowledge that you don't have? (I'll admit it is a common male failing, IMHO.)

When I know what's true, it just diminishes my faith in anything you say.

George H.

Unless, of course, the organisers could rely on getting back most of the $1.6 billion in taxes before it ever got to the winner.

Reply to
George Herold

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