31–40 of 261 posts
> The prosecutor said Tipton will serve no more than five years, if he behaves and makes parole. Well at least he didn't sell drugs. Slightly relevant story: A few years ago I was visiting China and my colleagues there were discussing a city official who had just been found guilty of embezzling tens of millions of dollars from the local government (which is more or less what this guy did). Me: "How much time did he g…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Especially with a frankly embarrassingly poor attempt to place distance between himself and the payouts. He picked his own brother and a close family friend? Might as well have walked up to his boss every other week with a spot of feigned surprise and a new jackpot winning ticket to cash out, figuring they could direct deposit it along with his paycheck. Really makes you wonder how many moderately intelligent people…
As a thought exercise, what do you think the minimum distance between the cheater and the payout would need to be in order to avoid detection?
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> "It's difficult even saying that with all the people that I know behind me that I hurt." It is interesting to think about who he considers he hurt. The potential winners who relied on lottery winning to secure a future for their families? The lottery workers? He is a criminal surely, but isn't the whole lottery system a tax on lack of education and it just gives false hope to people and encourages gambling. He redu…
> a tax on lack of education I hear this a lot, but I think people know what a longshot is. Is this so much more stupid than throwing your money away on useless consumer junk?
Gambling addiction and various mega-jackpot ticket-purchasing fervors are an indication that many people can't really comprehend the odds. A human can easily visualize 1 (the number of jackpot winners), but less so the scale of the 292,201,337 chances you have to lose (Powerball odds)
If you had a contest where you asked someone to pay $5 to correctly choose a single grain of rice out of 10,000lbs of rice... I doubt you'd get many takers because you're confronted with the physical reality of the odds.
It would be harder than picking a random year between now and when the first dinosaurs existed.
>Is this so much more stupid than throwing your money away on useless consumer junk?
"Junk" in the form of physical goods still holds some level of value. If you bought $1,000 of random physical goods in a year you'd more likely than not have something >$0
Time to switch over to provably fair lotteries!
There is an ICO next week for this!
/s
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lotto in Illinois was introduced as a way to help pay for public education. You can guess how that ended up... hell, they were not even paying the winners for a while (maybe they still are not).
The lottery does pay for education. And the pre-existing education funds were removed. Net gain in funding: 0.
Same thing happened, and continues to happen, with tobacco tax dollars.
> "It's difficult even saying that with all the people that I know behind me that I hurt." It is interesting to think about who he considers he hurt. The potential winners who relied on lottery winning to secure a future for their families? The lottery workers? He is a criminal surely, but isn't the whole lottery system a tax on lack of education and it just gives false hope to people and encourages gambling. He redu…
And before you evoke any comparisons with the probabilities of getting struck by lightning or hit by meteors, none of those will ever pay you a nice chunk of cash.
Investing the same amount of money in a financial device with higher assurances of returns is not a comparable experience, neither psychologically nor practically, even if we callously suppose that such instruments are in fact widely available across all cross-sections of society. Holding back the price of 1 ticket per drawing period from safer investments to gain a shot at a high-payout lottery is simply diversifying your investment portfolio.
Anyone know why these lotteries stopped using the traditional bingo ball machines in favour of a black box?
Anyone know why these lotteries stopped using the traditional bingo ball machines in favour of a black box?