41–50 of 162 posts
I think most of us realize that they're not going to win, but when the jackpot becomes a national event every 6 months or whatever, there's usually some joy in buying a ticket anyway
There's more joy in giving $2 to a person who needs it.
Spent $115,698 Won $10,598 Win/loss $-105,100 Balance $0 ROI: ~10%
ROI: ~1,000,000%
Spend 10 minutes imagining what you'd do with $496M. It might be fun.
This is a fascinating sentence: While the large jackpot prize may be tempting, it's extremely hard to have that one ticket in 292 million. I think my favorite part is that extremely hard isn't a very accurate description of how unlikely it is.
I saw a theory somewhere that human beings aren't very good at intuitively understanding even large order of magnitude differences between unlikely events. We have a mental category of "unlikely but not impossible" and slot everything from one in a thousand to one in a billion into that bucket.
If only real life had chrome dev tools console such to modify global vars like "winTotal = 100000000".
Build website to crowdsource $292,201,338. Buy all the lotto tickets. Pay back investors 150% of their investment. Make ~ $69.5M.
(assuming lotto tickets are a $1) (someone else can figure out the break even point after taxes)
Question: With a jackpot of $800mil and the chances of winning 1 in ~300mil, could you not buy 300mil tickets? (Excepting, of course, the risk that someone else wins and the cost of taxes).
So, yeah, probably not a winning strategy.
Question: With a jackpot of $800mil and the chances of winning 1 in ~300mil, could you not buy 300mil tickets? (Excepting, of course, the risk that someone else wins and the cost of taxes).
I think there is a limit on # tickets purchased.
When there are cracks in the lottery games there are people who do find ways to exploit them.
Free YC 2016 application: Build website to crowdsource $292,201,338. Buy all the lotto tickets. Pay back investors 150% of their investment. Make ~ $69.5M. (assuming lotto tickets are a $1) (someone else can figure out the break even point after taxes)