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Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

money.cnn.com

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Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#251

Post by thaumasiotes »

ZephyrP wrote: post #181
chowells wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about you, but I can't live off the proceeds from $10 in index funds. Not even if repeated 100 times.

The general principle here is right, but I was kind of curious about exactly what your gains would be. I curled the last 90 days from http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3021-gainnyse-gainer... and if you selected the largest percentage gainer every day for the past 100 days, given you started with $10, you'd have about 828 million after 90 days. (It's worth noting however with 2,800 stocks on the NYSE, that 2800…

> if you selected the largest percentage gainer every day for the past 100 days

This is exactly the opposite of the concept of an index fund.

Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#252

Post by PhasmaFelis »

raducu wrote: post #221
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sentence four. Let me spell it out for you: Venezuela and Russia would happily have allowed Snowden to fly, but the US was ready and willing to force down and search any plane that was even suspected of carrying Snowden.

Snowden is just a bargaining chip Russia prefers kept in its own pocket.

Quite possibly, but they never tried to prevent him from flying, so that's irrelevant here.

Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#253

Post by InitialLastName »

chowells wrote: post #143
InitialLastName wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy index funds and live off the proceeds?

I don't know about you, but I can't live off the proceeds from $10 in index funds. Not even if repeated 100 times.

I was talking about the daydreaming of what to with the winnings.

I must be uncreative with my consumption.

Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#254

Post by gnaritas »

falsedan wrote: post #217
gnaritas wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a much easier game, it's a 150 billion dollar market that trades a few billion a day; converting millions is nothing. Nor do you need to liquidate it all at once at your destination, you can take your time.

No one's questioning the liquidity of the BC market; getting the money to and from the exchange would be a gigantic hassle. Banks generally have reporting requirements for transactions of a certain size, many countries are more uptight about opening accounts (Know Your Customer laws) due to previous terrorism-related money-laundering operations; as a US citizen, he'd have the burden of reporting his overseas income b…

> getting the money to and from the exchange would be a gigantic hassle

No, it's a simple bank transfer. It doesn't matter if that's reported to anyone, transfer to an exchange in your own country and you're not doing anything illegal. And the topic is the difficulty of going around capital controls, not the tax burden of an ex-patriot. Bitcoin makes getting around capital control easy; easy doesn't mean legal. You're refuting things that have nothing to do with the topic being discussed.

Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#255

Post by falsedan »

gnaritas wrote: post #254
falsedan wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one's questioning the liquidity of the BC market; getting the money to and from the exchange would be a gigantic hassle. Banks generally have reporting requirements for transactions of a certain size, many countries are more uptight about opening accounts (Know Your Customer laws) due to previous terrorism-related money-laundering operations; as a US citizen, he'd have the burden of reporting his overseas income b…

> getting the money to and from the exchange would be a gigantic hassle No, it's a simple bank transfer. It doesn't matter if that's reported to anyone, transfer to an exchange in your own country and you're not doing anything illegal. And the topic is the difficulty of going around capital controls, not the tax burden of an ex-patriot. Bitcoin makes getting around capital control easy; easy doesn't mean legal. You'r…

> and you're not doing anything illegal

Did you mean to post this in the comments for a different submission? Because I'm pretty sure that laundering money from fraudulent lottery entries… is extremely not legal.

Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#256

Post by teddyh »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #249
teddyh wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds exactly like a smoker “explaining” why they smoke. They claim to enjoy it. In reality, of course, smokers only smoke because it makes them stop feeling the nicotine urge for a short while, i.e. they feel like a normal non-smoker person for a short while. Likewise, anyone could fantasize about getting a windfall of mountains of money from far likelier events, like an unknown relative willing their fortune…

> They claim to enjoy it. In reality, of course, smokers only smoke because it makes them stop feeling the nicotine urge for a short while Using this model, it's difficult to explain where new smokers come from.

The reason people start to smoke are the same reasons people start to drink coffee, or tea, or beer. Nobody likes any of those things when they first try them, but they choose to acquire the taste, for either social reasons and/or because they want the side effect (caffeine or alcohol). In the case of cigarettes, the social effect has been very strong but is declining, and the wanted side effect is illusory, but as long as people still think that they will get something from nicotine, people will start to smoke, or vape, or chew, or snuff, or whatever form it will take in the future.

Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#257

Post by thaumasiotes »

teddyh wrote: post #256
thaumasiotes wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They claim to enjoy it. In reality, of course, smokers only smoke because it makes them stop feeling the nicotine urge for a short while Using this model, it's difficult to explain where new smokers come from.

The reason people start to smoke are the same reasons people start to drink coffee, or tea, or beer. Nobody likes any of those things when they first try them, but they choose to acquire the taste , for either social reasons and/or because they want the side effect (caffeine or alcohol). In the case of cigarettes, the social effect has been very strong but is declining, and the wanted side effect is illusory, but as…

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/11/schizophrenia-no-smokin...

In general, you're not on firm ground when someone says "I enjoy X" and you say "no, I can tell what you enjoy better than you can".

Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#258

Post by auntienomen »

Chathamization wrote: post #172
diggernet wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the odds of winning the lottery, as low as they are, are significantly higher than Buffet giving you $300M. It's not deceiving yourself to recognize that miniscule odds are greater than zero.

Not sure why you think it would be 0%; people have stumbled across $15 million Pollock paintings by accident[1]. William Durkin happened to be at the right place at the right time to save Howard Hughe's life, and it looks like he was at least offered money afterwards[2]. There's plenty of other stories where something extremely unlikely happens and someone gets rich. The likelihood of winning the Powerball is somethi…

The kind of fantasy you're describing isn't an equivalent good. People buying lotto tickets are fantasizing, amongst other things, on not being dependent on the largesse of others.

Re: Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison

#259

Post by eric_h »

rdtsc wrote: post #171
jacquesm wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would go for the contrary interpretation: he helped people become wary of lotteries and showed them beyond a shadow of doubt that they could be rigged even if they appeared to be fair. He did in fact damage the lottery, not the non-lottery winners (in the aggregate maybe, but not in a specific way) other than that he hopefully vaccinated them and caused them to bow out of playing the lottery altogether thus saving…

> he helped people become wary of lotteries and showed them beyond a shadow of doubt that they could be rigged Yap, I was kind of hinting at that. What you said is a valid way to look at it. > It's fine to gamble as long as the beneficiary is the state, never mind that on average only the lottery organizer gets ahead. It's part of preying on the poor. Same with payday loans, and alcohol sales. Having lived in poor pa…

> then what happens is that education funds get reduced and used for something else because there are these "lottery funds" coming in

That's pretty much what happens, any time you inject funds from a new source into a thing, the other source of fund for said thing tends to get reduced.

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