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> 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 usele
by Isamu 9y ago
> 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?
- icebraining 9y agoIs this so much more stupid than throwing your money away on useless consumer junk? No, but so what?
- booleandilemma 9y agoI once read the lottery is a way of buying hope.
- fitchjo 9y agoI play every once in awhile, when the jackpot gets to be large enough they start talking about it on TV. The $10 or $20 I spend is well worth daydreaming about the things I would if I won.
- InitialLastName 9y agoBuy index funds and live off the proceeds?
- goatforce5 9y agoWhy not both?
- chowells 9y agoI don't know about you, but I can't live off the proceeds from $10 in index funds. Not even if repeated 100 times.
- ZephyrP 9y agoThe 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.html 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 2800^100 is much longer odds than winning the lottery. Actually, your odds of selected the very highest percentage stock gainer three days in a row are lower than your odds of winning the powerball, assuming such a thing is random). Unrelated, this has really been a winning quarter for logistics and trucking companies!
- kamaal 9y ago>>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. This is lottery by very definition.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago> 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.
- InitialLastName 9y agoI was talking about the daydreaming of what to with the winnings. I must be uncreative with my consumption.
- chowells 9y agoOh. I totally misread your post as advocating putting the money into an index fund instead of buying lottery tickets. Actually, retiring on the winnings is pretty much what I'd do, too. Though I'd want to diversify holdings over more asset classes than just index funds. When you just want to coast on passive income, it's fair to say even index funds are too risky to put everything in.
- creaghpatr 9y agoIn Georgia the lottery-funded state school near-full scholarship is called HOPE.
- Chathamization 9y agoI never really understood this argument. I mean, you can daydream for free about Warren Buffet choosing you at random to give $300 million to, or inheriting a distant relatives belongings and finding a Pollock in there. Maybe with the lottery its easier for people to deceive themselves about the actual odds?
- diggernet 9y agoI 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.
- Chathamization 9y agoNot 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 something like 0.000000005%. Not sure what the odds are of these other unlikely events, but even if they're less likely - you really think someone is able to daydream about a 0.000000005% chance but not a 0.000000000005% chance? [1] http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/12/us/lost-jackson-pollock-painting-garage-trnd/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/12/us/lost-jackson-pollock-painti... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes#Near-fatal_crash_of_the_XF-11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes#Near-fatal_crash...
- auntienomen 9y agoThe 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.
- prawn 9y agoI've seen a story about it being the only readily and quickly accessible thing approaching small scale investment for people.
- hamandcheese 9y agoMost the people I see buying lottery tickets are in no position to throw money away on anything.
- Retric 9y agoEven homeless people generally have some disposable income. They simply have different priorities, which does not make either of you correct.
- vertex-four 9y agoEhh. A $1/week expense which buys you hope and dreams for a week isn't that bad in the grand scheme of things. It's certainly cheaper than cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs to temporarily take the stress out of the fact that you're in a long-term shitty situation with little way out of it. This concept that the poor should only ever work, eat, and sleep, and any attempt to look after their mental health is wasting money, is outright dangerous.
- smeyer 9y ago> Ehh. A $1/week expense which buys you hope and dreams for a week isn't that bad in the grand scheme of things There's a demographic of lottery players that really only are spending $1 a week (or even $1 every few months or whatever), but there is also a large demographic that is regularly buying multiple $20 scratch tickets on a regular basis, which tends to be more of what people are thinking of when they evoke the stereotype of someone who "can't afford" to play the lottery. I'm not saying that only the rich should be allowed to enjoy myself, but if a friend asked me to get their finances in order and was spending multiple percent of their salary on lottery tickets (which is a real phenomenon), cutting back would be my first suggestion.
- vertex-four 9y agoThe actual solution for the population which spends significant money on scratch cards, of course, is to invest in social care and support for people who are obviously very vulnerable. They'd be vulnerable whether the scratch cards existed or not.
- ahhhhhhhhhh 9y ago>but I think people know what a longshot is. 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
- bradleyjg 9y agoI think this is broadly correct. Your system 1 (in Kahneman terms) can tell the difference between 50/50 and 1/10 but something like 1 in 1000 in is put in the same bucket as 1 in 100,000,000 -- unlikely but not impossible. If you want to actually work with odds like that you need to use system 2 to compute something more tractable like EV (~$0.75 on a $2 ticket for tonight's drawing). In the interest of full disclosure, I probably spent $30 on lotto tickets last year.
- ahhhhhhhhhh 9y agoI think we've all made gambles despite the odds. That's a bit of an unescapable human element.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Mc_Big_G 9y agoYeah, tell me another way you can become insanely rich with no effort and such little cost.
- 72deluxe 9y agoWork in a startup? Just kidding!