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You need 27 tickets to guarantee a win on the UK National Lottery

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Re: You need 27 tickets to guarantee a win on the UK National Lottery

#61
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It does "good" with about 25% of it's income. A lot of that "good" is stuff that the government or local councils would just fund directly if the Lottery wasn't paying for them. Much better to just give money to your favourite charity directly.

>Much better to just give money to your favourite charity directly. Checking the (published) 'admin costs' vs actual donated/ used monies is a great way to pick favorites.

I disagree. I'd argue that Wikipedia or the Internet Archive are 100% admin, and that's a good thing. I don't want them spending money paying people to write articles or paying people to add stuff to the archive.

There are a lot of charities in between where some more money on admin (e.g. better training, better organisation) can make the front line workers more effective.

Re: You need 27 tickets to guarantee a win on the UK National Lottery

#62
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In no universe is the UK lottery good. All lotteries, the UK lottery included, are effectively sucking money out of the poor. It is profoundly, grotesquely regressive. If the UK wanted to have an ethical, legitimate mechanism for distributing funds, it should levy a progressive tax that raises the same amount of money as the lottery.

Rishi already taxes the tits off anything he can recall after consuming half a tin of Dulux, please no more taxation. My point isn't that the lottery is good, just that its the clear moral winner in an industry which includes Bet365, William hill, Coral and a million other pretenders. If you want a small gamble and are adult enough to have financial independence its your best bet. If you don't or.. don't its totally…

> My point isn't that the lottery is good, just that its the clear moral winner in an industry which includes Bet365, William hill, Coral and a million other pretenders.

That's like saying burglary is the clear moral winner over murder. While we all would prefer to be burgled than murdered, I think it's fair to say that burglary is very, very bad.

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