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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).
The cash payout is ~$500 million, and after taxes you may end up with $309 million. So, yeah, probably not a winning strategy.
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.
A car goes from San Diego to New Orleans and the driver throws a quarter out of his window at some point in time.
Now you drive the same route. You get the chance to stop once on this route. If your front tire comes to a halt at the exact same spot of that quarter, you hit the jackpot.
How likely does that feel?
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)
Crowdsource ~$146 million and only buy half the lotto tickets. For each of the ~11 million combinations of regular numbers, buy 13 tickets covering half the possible powerball numbers.
Assume you win the $800 million jackpot and lose 50% to taxes, you have $400 million left over. You spend ~$292 million to double your investors money and have ~$107 million left over.
Assume you don't win the $800 million jackpot, you still have 13 $1 million tickets left over. You can either pay that back to your investors, or keep it for yourself and point to a clause in a contract they signed saying that you'd only pay out if you won the jackpot.
Somehow I doubt it's legal to do something like that, but it's interesting nonetheless.
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)
Would not work unless it ballooned into 10 figures. Lump sum taxes would take most of the gains away and that assumes you are the only winner.
I recently purchased a OneRNG trng and decided to give it a chance at guessing the right number with its quantum-noise super powers. Reading from it overnight produced 24 million guesses and no winner. Though several were just one number off. Too bad so sad. I'm really curious what RNG the registers use when people say "let the computer guess for me". I'm pretty sure they don't all have a TRNG installed on the circui…
Is there reason to believe that a TRNG would somehow select numbers with a better chance of winning than any other method? I can see the method impacting the number of dollars you win but surely any valid set of numbers has the same chance to win as any other. It's not like your TRNG is actually emulating the behavior of the balls in the machine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Join lottery pool at work. Might lose $2, but won't have to kill myself if everyone at the office wins and I have to show up everyday remembering that fact.
I find that it's more enjoyable to not join the pool and then buy myself a lunch when the participants inevitably lose. I make sure that everyone knows that it's a celebratory lunch. And then I wonder why I don't have any friends.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It stops when balance = 0, i.e. you spent $x + all your winnings on lottery tickets.
Right, which is some bullshit. I mean, they cheated. Yes, it is mathematically provable that a random walk will eventually touch 0. That would be the case even if the lottery was strongly positive expected value. They ask you to comment if you won. Their program guarantees you lose when it terminates -- even if you hit the 1:292,000,000 odds.
A movie costs $12 in a theater for 2 hrs of enjoyment. A lottery ticket costs $1 for a week of intermittent enjoyment. For certain segments of the population, a lottery ticket is a downright bargain.
Math problems are easy. Real world problems are difficult.
As an aside, it's so important that people who care enough about a social challenge like the lottery/gambling addiction are able to find the ACTUAL root cause to address. I'm not blaming the LA Times. I LOVE content like this - and not all content needs a purpose. BUT - if the purpose was supposed to be helping people who play the lottery see their folly, this probably isn't the right tack.