I've known people who have spent hundreds of dollars a month on lottery tickets. It really is a tax on stupidity, or at least one form of stupidity.
A few months ago, I visited some friends out where they have "river casinos," which are technically mounted on barges. We went to one for lunch, because they had a great lunch buffet at a good price. One of our party skipped coffee and went to play the slots. After the rest of us had our coffees and desserts, we went looking for her.
As we walked around the multitudes of slot machines, I was struck by the utter joylessness of the place. Nobody, and I mean nobody, looked like they were having any fun. I've seen machine operators in factories who had more fun at what they were doing. I bet that I could have gone up to any one of them, clubbed them with a fire extinguisher and the slot-machine operators on either side would not have even noticed.
Gambling is a tax on stupidity. The only difference between casinos and state lotteries is who benefits from it.
8 comments:
From a viewpoint of statistics, the statistical difference in chances of winning from buying one ticket vs. buying a hundred tickets is so small as to be virtually zero. So if you do want to play the lottery just to dream about what would happen if you won it, just buy one (1) ticket, and be done with it.
- Badtux the Numbers Penguin
I've noticed the same thing here out west where we have dozens of Indian Casinos, there is a definite air of desperation that permiates the whole place and it seems that people are playing with their grocery money or worse. Not a fun place in my opinion.
A fool and his money are soon parted, don't help much if your a stupid fool.
Yeah, I occasionally invest a whole dollar in the saying, "You can't win if you don't play." I don't even waste my time checking the numbers - if a winning ticket is sold in my town, it'll be in the paper...
Almost every week, some poor person in America becomes a millionaire through the lottery. How many accomplish that through hard work and frugality?
Joe, if they did, as BadTux recommends, and bought one or two tickets for the dream, that's fine. But I know people who spend hundreds a month on that "dream".
As for those instant millionaires, it's not hard to find stories of how many of them pissed their winnings away and wound up right back where they were the day before they bought that ticket.
BadTux:From a viewpoint of statistics
But the lottery tickets are not random, as the operators make sure that there are a certain number of winners in each roll...otherwise, the mugs would hit a long streak of losers in one store and winners at another and shun the first. In order for small store sales to work, they need to have a certain number of winners in a roll.
Which means that when the guy at the counter has seen a long string of losers, s/he can buy tickets with a loaded chance of getting winners.
But....
WHERE DID THE CARTOON COME FROM, I WANT TO SEE MORE OF THEM?????
Joe, the chances of becoming a millionaire via hard work and frugality are roughly the same as the chances of becoming a millionaire via buying a lottery ticket. The differences between 1 in 25,000,000 chances and 1 in 300,000,000 chances (assuming that one (1) poor person becomes a millionaire via hard work and frugality in the course of a year -- which *does* happen) is 0.00000004 - 0.000000003333333 = 0.000000036666667 -- or roughly 0.0000036666667% difference between the two chances of becoming a millionaire. In other words, so tiny as to be irrelevant.
EBM, exactly. If you want to buy a lottery ticket to dream of being a millionaire, fine. But buying 10 lottery tickets or 100 lottery tickets or 1000 lottery tickets gives you roughly the same chance of winning -- roughly 1 in 25,000,000. 1/25000000 or 10/25000000 or 100/250000000, the difference between any of those is so tiny as to basically be irrelevant.
Stewart: what you state is probably true for scratch-off games, but is not true for the big-money ones that are picked from a hopper or via a random number generator equivalent thereof. Assuming the state gaming commission is on the ball, those are as random as are genuinely possible given the limitations of the mechanisms involved.
All in all, I agree with the cartoon completely. (And for the person wondering, "what cartoon is that?!", it's called Pearls Before Swine and is syndicated to newspapers).
- Badtux the Math Penguin
(word verification: "germies". What you get from the lever of a slot machine.)
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