I think people understand the odds are small. However, perhaps they perceive their chances of meaningfully turn around their life in other ways have even smaller odds. i.e. improbable vs actually impossible. At least the lottery doesn't care about your current circumstance and everyone has an equal (equally small) chance.
Secondly, because everyone realizes the chances are small, the real product being sold is Hope. Even the advertisements for the lotteries address this. The thing you're buying is 30 seconds of daydreaming so you can comfortably tackle the rest of the day.
I’m at the point where I take it as a red flag when someone doesn’t understand this, and instead bangs on about “low odds” and “the idiots that think that they’ll win”. A combination of superficial booksmarts, a misplaced sense of elitism, and a very real lack of emotional intelligence, that I know that I don’t enjoy being around. There’s definitely a low end on this bell curve, but I think that your average Joe Blow off the street has about as good an undemanding of the chances of winning the lottery as you or I. Which is to say that we’re all definitely flawed in our ability to intuitively comprehend very large numbers, but not uniquely so. It’s just nice to feel like something good might possibly be coming your way. It’s about hope, exactly as you say. I’m barely even an occasional gambler, including the lottery. The one or two times where I’ve bought a ticket, it was worth the $10 or whatever I paid, which I truly do not miss an iota and never have. It’s a game. Anyone who doesn’t get that is deranged.
There's a difference between buying hope, and decreasing the quality of what you do have significantly for false hope.
The hope of winning the lottery is essentially false hope, but false hope is better than nothing, that's true.
But look at LatencyKills post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46474645 if someone is buying 100s of dollars worth of lottery tickets that's a real problem, I'm sure you understand that with your mention of the $10 you spent, but you should consider the people who sneer and get upset about people buying lottery tickets might not be people who care much about 10 dollars but rather people who grew up with caregivers that spent all the money coming into the house on false hope.
> There's a difference between buying hope, and decreasing the quality of what you do have significantly
You are making the same category error that the parent is talking about. It’s not a rational risk/reward calculation.
It’s more like a compulsion / addiction to the soothing / hopeful feeling that people feel for a few minutes when they think about the problems in their life that would be alleviated by winning.
Remember that the lottery is effectively the same game that used to be called “running numbers” when mob families ran it in the 20th century. The government though encouraging gambling addiction at the time was not worth the social costs. Now those costs are apparently the fault of the addict / family and not the government/ lottery contractor.
And I feel you're making the same category error that I was responding to, that is to say it may not be a rational/risk reward calculation, but people who indulge in a small bit of irrationality are having fun and people who indulge in large bits of irrationality significantly damaging their already damaged finances have a problem.
>Remember that the lottery is effectively the same game
I believe running the numbers was guaranteed never to pay out significantly because it was rigged, the lottery is just statistically against you.
The lottery is not legal in all 50 states. IIRC Alabama still considers the lottery to be morally problematic, which is the same reason it was not legal during the “running numbers” days.
Or they might just be sneering because they are emotionally incompetent book-smart jerks, like my brother. He has absolutely no personal experience of financial hardship and doesn't believe there is any explanation except stupidity for someone spending $10 on lottery tickets before they've fully funded their 401k for the year.
I believe that category was already handled by the comment I was responding to, which effectively said anyone who sneered at the lottery was like your brother without taking into account the subset of people I pointed to.
I'm not sure what percentage of people that talk about the lottery being a tax on stupidity do so because they have been personally traumatized by its effect on their family, or seen its effects on others, but I do believe it is the ones like your brother who seem to get most of the press.
It was - it sounded like your comment was arguing with the one you responded to, by suggesting that they are misidentifying the attitude of the people they are talking about.
yeah I wasn't saying they are necessarily misidentifying the attitude of the people they are talking about, only they had it as a blanket identification of anyone saying negative things about buying lottery tickets as being uncaring jerks, so I wanted to point out there are probably also people in that group making the statement who have a more nuanced view.
On cue, you demonstrate exactly what the previous poster was talking about. Every single HN user understands how the lottery works. I wish I knew an alternative word to "mansplaining".
My brother left school after ninth grade and struggles financially — he can’t afford basic health insurance, yet he’ll spend $100 on lottery tickets whenever possible.
I understand the utility he’s purchasing: a temporary sense of hope. What concerns me is the implicit misunderstanding of probability. The difference in expected value between purchasing one ticket and fifty is statistically negligible. This isn’t about elitism — it’s simply about recognizing orders of magnitude and the arithmetic reality of vanishingly small odds.
My uncle was for the longest of time a gambling addict, and would buy lottery tickets. It was disheartening seeing him ruin his life over this "hope".
I certainly don't doubt that my uncle also felt a strong sense of "hope" when he bought his lottery tickets, but for what differed a lot. My uncle would buy lottery tickets in the hope of regaining the amount of money that he had lost to gambling, while you probably buy them in the hope of having a significantly higher quality of life if you win. One is financially a very bad decision, the other is not (as bad).
Personally, I would never buy lottery tickets. Not because the chance of you winning is small, but because you're supporting a predatory system that attacks those that are the most vulnerable to gambling: those who've already lost large amounts of money. I hate the gambling industry and the damage it causes to regular people.
Luckily my uncle has stopped gambling, but the effects of when he was a gambler are still, sadly, visible.
In all that rant you forget that there's a difference between paying 3$ to buy "hope" and excitement until next week's draw, and compulsively buying scratch cards with abysmal odds several times a day. The latter is a real problem and many jurisdictions around the world allow these predatory games to be sold and advertised everywhere.
I think there's something to be said for separating disdain for the person and disdain for the institution; unfortunately the latter is used as an excuse for the former.
But actually... there really are, IMO, better ways to "buy hope", or for that matter positive feelings, many of which actually have positive EV (even if not financially), and it is in my opinion a systemic flaw that we use well-known exploits in human psychology to take money from, statistically, the people who have the least.
There is a place for everyone. We need the elitist, number crunching nerds to remind us that it's bad odds and the gambler to show us that you can find enjoyment in the simple things.
I think:
1) Like you said, people are buying hope.
2) People cannot fathom this degree of improbability. So, the fact that it's at least possible overrides the near-impossibility of it.
3) There is some aspect of entertainment and social-interaction to it. It's a bit like watching sports. Who you're cheering for is irrelevant, and whoever wins doesn't change your life in any way, but still, we watch it.
The social aspect is real. The only time I've seen anyone in my family buy a lottery ticket was when one of the jackpots got big enough to become headline news. Mum bought a ticket just to be able to talk about it (and had a chat to us about probability and gambling).
I spend about $10/year on scratchers since I like the causes they support. But most of the volume that I see being bought at the corner store down the street comes from folks who really don't appear to understand the odds.
I know people in the neighbourhood/street I was born, who still live there (well over 50 years in the same house) who bought the postcode lottery tickets since forever, 12x a year, never won anything; this year it fell in the adjacent area code... It must hurt.
In the Dutch postcode lottery, they draw a random postcode (roughly a street) and everyone that lives there and has a ticket wins. The wider area code (village level) win smaller prizes.
People get FOMO - what if my neighbors become millionaires but I didn't have a ticket?
And in this case, some code very close to theirs won. It makes it seem you missed out by a tiny margin.
You have to buy a ticket - presumably you have to commit to an address somehow at that point, so people can only buy for one postcode even if they're lying. Unless there's a skewed outcome that shouldn't really matter. (And if there is a skewed outcome...the people who'd bought the winning postcode and didn't have a house on that street would be under heavy scrutiny!)
> If you have more money you can buy more tickets which leads to higher—or even certain—odds.
I don't think there are any lotteries with that feature. You can guarantee that you win, but you still won't have certain odds because the payout isn't guaranteed.
No need to get upset. I replied earnestly, I thought you might’ve skipped it.
The point I was making is that with more money you increase your chances to win. The fact that you may have to split the winnings isn’t relevant, you still won. I was explicitly responding to the “the lottery doesn't care about your current circumstance and everyone has an equal (equally small) chance” remark.
> I replied earnestly, I thought you might’ve skipped it.
So... you didn't read the second sentence of my two-sentence comment? Or do you have some theory where "you can guarantee that you win" means it isn't possible to guarantee that you win?
> The point I was making is that with more money you increase your chances to win. The fact that you may have to split the winnings isn’t relevant, you still won.
And here, you're still wrong. You can guarantee that you "win" the lottery instead of "losing" it. But if you're going to be buying seven million lottery tickets, it matters quite a lot whether you end up buying seven million tickets at a dollar each and making $1.05 per, or buying seven million tickets at a dollar each and making $0.52 per or $0.35 per. Collecting a jackpot by losing five million dollars is not a "win" in any sense that's not internal to a lottery department, including the sense of people who like daydreaming about winning the lottery.
> I was explicitly responding to the “the lottery doesn't care about your current circumstance and everyone has an equal (equally small) chance” remark.
Note that everyone also has the same chance of buying out the lottery at a profit - it's not necessary to buy those tickets out of pocket, because you can do it with investor backing. The story in your link is the story of someone who bought out a lottery with investor backing. He's not alone; other people also buy out lotteries using money they didn't provide. This is one of the easiest investor pitches you can give.
It’s disconnected from reality to believe anyone can get investor money to buy this amount of lottery tickets. Most people, even if they realise the odds, wouldn’t even know where to start.
But you’ve already locked yourself into an incorrect preconceived notion of the original point (which is simply: “not everyone has an equal chance on the lottery, though on the surface that may look like the case”) and are for some reason getting angrier with each response, so I don’t think we’ll get anywhere here.
This is technically true, but the end result is that if you abolish the lottery (unpopular) you have to raise taxes (even more unpopular) to replace lost revenue.
Sin taxes work so well at plugging funding gaps specifically because they are optional.
That and they are taxing the poor and under educated who are least likely to complain.
Making things explicit such as stamping a “45% Tax” on lottery tickets really changes people’s perception. The Trump administration almost flipped out when Amazon considered explicitly adding tariffs to people’s checkout.
I’m reminded of that company that added a Made in USA option of their product that you could select next to the normal price and nobody would buy it at any price premium.
Like, literally nobody.
I wish I could remember where that blog post was, I think it came up on HN.
Humans do a poor job estimating extreme odds. 0% chance or 100% of a high risk/reward event. How many people in rural areas are prepping for a Carrington Event-sized solar flare or nuclear war, but a car accident or cancer diagnosis and resulting medical bills would sooner and statistically more likely to ruin their lives? Many. They see the small chance of survival as being high reward, with low risk.
Likewise, the lure of a 100% chance of life-changing material wealth that takes the low risk of $2 fits the same mold.
Sure, I'll grant you that. But then explain this: Why is it that, whenever I tell people who are about to play the lottery, to pick the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, they say "that's crazy, the numbers will never come out in a row like that"?
Until someone says "you know what, what the hell, that's as good a pick as any", I'm going to go with "they don't know how small the odds are".
This is interesting but IMO it's very likely to be chosen more often than average.
If you choose a random number, then for each other player your chance of picking the same numbers as them is the same as your chance of winning: in the case of Powerball, 1 in 292,201,338 = 0.0000000034. If you instead non-randomly choose 123456, then for each player that actively avoids 123456 your chance of picking the same numbers as them only decreases by 0.0000000034 (from 0.0000000034 to 0). But for each player that actively chooses 123456, your chance of picking the same numbers as them increases by 0.9999999966 (from 0.0000000034 to 1).
We could model this more precisely by looking at the other players' choices as semi-random with some combinations weighted higher and some lower, but you see my point: even if lots of people are repelled by 'obvious' sequences like 123456, this can be outweighed by a very small number being attracted to them.
I do see your point, but I doubt this probability analysis was done by the people who say "what? The numbers will never be drawn in a sequence like that". It's not that they want to avoid common numbers.
Agreed! I don't think it undermines your original point, and IMO the linked site could do some good by giving people a better intuitive sense of just how low the odds are.
I rarely play Powerball Mega millions but when I do, it's fun thinking about how you'd spend (and protect) your winnings. "First I'll pay off that old debt, then I'll buy a new car, then I'll buy that cute house I've been driving past everyday. Then I'll call my boss and tell him to suck a fat one".
I would be really curious to see the money side of this. I am not sure about Powerball, but with EuroJackpot, some of the smaller wins can cover the cost of the ticket (or even cover a holiday!).
It would be really interesting to watch the expected value play out over repeated plays!! I am imagining a running balance where you keep track of total spend versus total returns. Most of the time the balance steadily goes more negative, with occasional jumps back up when you hit a partial match, and very rare big spikes from a larger win.
Should also include a running tally for the total net profit taken in by the government (after payouts) across all expected ticket sales. That way you can watch your number going negative while the government's balloons up into billions.
This would show the big difference between the Euro and US lottery formats, where (typically) in Euro lotteries, the government takes taxes on the stake and so the jackpot is tax free, whereas in US the prize is taxed as income or windfall. This is one of the reasons why US lottery jackpots tend to be stated as much bigger than Euro ones despite having a larger purchaser pool.
Love the idea. Could also allow the viewer to pick how often they buy tickets and keep track of how much time passes. I think this dimension would help give context to the losses number.
Might hide all this behind the current automatic view with a “play it yourself” toggle.
I think it would be interesting to have a version where the chosen numbers were the same every time. We all know the odds won't change but there are countless people who play the lottery this way. They have "their" numbers and they never deviate for fear that if they do, that's when "their" numbers would pop up and they'd miss out on the win.
That would be cool for this website, but don't try it in real life. If you win, it is almost guaranteed that you will share your prize with many other people.
When the U.K. lottery launched you picked 6 from 49.
The prizes were shared amongst everyone
If the prize pot was say £10m, 4 winners would get £2.5m each.
I suspect that the hunebr of people choosing 123456 would be far higher than choosing 6 random numbers. Thus in the event your numbers did come up, you would get far less winning than someone who had the same odds but chose say 13 22 32 35 40 42
You're romanticizing, sadly. Every time I see someone scratching off numbers, I see a twisted industry exploiting human hopefulness and naivety. Dreaming costs nothing.
When I see office workers walking off to the dreamer highrise offices in the sky, I enviously dream of being that worker in the sky, with all those dreams of grandeur.
I play the national lottery in the UK mainly because of the good causes it supports. Athletes competing in the Olympics for Team GB for example receive significant funding from the lottery. I see my ticket as a charity donation with the added fun of an astronomically small chance of winning money.
There's a property website which covers my local area, and every few weeks I'll do a search for the city-center, and sort by highest-price.
It's fun to look at the kinda house you could buy if you had €5 million in the bank. Even though I'd never have that much, and even if I did I wouldn't spend it on such a thing.
That's a habit I picked up when I lived in the UK and I played their national lottery once every month or so.
(/r/SpottedonRightmove/ is also a fun sub if you like this kinda thing; "right move" is a UK estate agents chain.)
Couldn’t the dreaming be done even without betting? This feels like an excuse to me to be completely honest.
I’ve personally had thoughts about what I would do if I were millionaire, and given the amount of stories of people coming into a large sums of money and their life getting significantly worse, I’d prefer to actually not win it.
Presumably its easier to dream when there is an unpredictable outcome, rather than knowing you have to wake up tomorrow to spend the day driving around and pissing in bottles.
An outside force that could change circumstances is a better feeling than knowing that really isn't any way of changing your career when you can't go to school because you can't afford it.
That law, as per its name, applies to headlines in publications, not literally every question. Otherwise the answer to everything would be “no”.
> Presumably its easier to dream when there is an unpredictable outcome
Anecdotally, I know almost no one who plays the lottery, but almost everyone at some point has shared an “if I won the lottery” dream. Playing isn’t a prerequisite. It’s not too different from dreaming of becoming a rockstar when you can’t even play an instrument. Most of us have some version of that, no money necessary.
What I love about this is how it demonstrates that the waiting is the most powerful part. That week is where a lotto user’s brain does all the work for the lotto corp. The anticipation! The excitement. What if? Oh let’s daydream! Oh the dopamine!
You don’t even have to sell them hope. Just sell them the sensation of hope.
I view buying a lottery ticket as a way to fund the things that the taxes are allocated to while also getting to fantasize until the drawing. I play maybe twice a year. There's near zero chance I'll win. That's not the point. The point is to have that fantasy, just for a moment.
That gets messy in a hurry. Most of the time time a lottery is introduced to help fund school districts, funding from other sources for those districts dries up. Money is fungible, and the effect is as if the lottery money directly went somewhere other than its earmarked purpose.
Hope is a pretty good thing to have, though. And it's one of the few things many people actually _can_ have. Therefore maybe lotteries aren't so bad after all even if nobody ever wins, and posts like this are actually bad.
Many people come down off that kind of hope when their numbers don’t come up. I’ve seen it. I have friends who felt it. You might perceive it as a sort of loan to get you through the week. But you owe it back plus the $2 interest.
A few reasons I still play despite understanding the odds. The euro millions also distributes money to charitable organisations, so I see my play as a donation, and that I’m purchasing a day dream.
People still win the jackpot, frequently. Some of those people probably understood the odds too, and it just happened to them, that feeling must be pretty wild.
What would be cool is being able to enter a ticket price, and keep a running count of financials to show how underwater you are on a net basis.
Could also change the cadence for tallying purposes (so 1 second = 1 week/fortnight/month) to keep track of how many weeks, months or years one has been doing this for. But that might get depressing!
This reminds me of a (dirt cheap - about 0.5€) scratch ticket available when I was growing up. The number of winning tickets, as specified on the ticket, was 51%. The 2% up from the usual 49% meant you won more than you lost. The smallest prize was about twice the cost of the ticket. We would run to the store on our lunch break, buy a couple of tickets, rinse and repeat a few times, and have money for whatever food we wanted for the day.
(and no, you wouldn't be able to farm them - the store only carried X amount of tickets, and they usually sold out quickly)
Fun fact, at that time the gambling industry was regulated in Sweden, and as such all games (and otherwise - e.g. scratch tickets) was all sold by the government monopoly.
As to the reason why they would have a loss leader in an organisation that actively worked to minimize gambling - beats me.
The scratch ticket was later renamed, and with the rename they reduced the number of winning tickets. It was at 48.5% (or thereabouts) last I checked.
The monopoly has now been abolished, largely due to pressure from digital services.
I think for most people, they just think _someone_ will win eventually and you can't win if you don't play, so why not part with some (hopefully) disposable income that could turn their entire life around.
"Lottery-like" mechanisms for selling homes exist in the UK as "prize competitions" or "house raffles", which operate under specific legal rules to avoid being classified as illegal lotteries. This method gained significant news coverage, particularly a high-profile case in 2017, and has become a growing trend.
Neat. I like that multiple clients get the same websocket data, as opposed to each just running their own simulation. I will be watching https://lotteryeverysecond.lffl.me/wins with interest. ;)
> You are more likely to...get dealt a royal flush in poker on your first hand (1 in 649,740)
This is true but a bit misleading: 99% of people actually playing poker in the US today are playing Texas Hold'em or other variants where "your first hand" contains more than 5 cards and is vastly more likely to have a royal flush. I've had several royal flushes but would not want to think I'm only an order of magnitude or two away from having the luck of a Powerball winner.
Insightful. Similar to worldometers.info.
Reminds me of VSauce’s mind blowing YouTube video visualizing how big 52 factorial is.
A useful statistic to include is the probability of becoming a successful business owner, or better yet, the probability of getting a job that pays an annual salary of 200k, 1mil. etc. Maybe that will inspire people to dream more practically.
Another insightful feature would be to emulate playing at the rate of real life (approx. tickets per second in real life).
For me a good way to visualize it is, you get given a key. It works on exactly one of the houses in your entire country, and you get one try (no you cant inspect the lock first and all keys look the same). Good luck trying!
Why not buy lottery tickets? The only thing smaller than the ridiculously small chance of winning is absolute zero, from never playing. Bad odds are still odds :)
I buy lottery maybe once a year when jackpot gets crazy. Not expecting to win - just paying $2 for a few days of "what if I quit my job tomorrow" daydreams. Cheaper than therapy.
So what happens if this wins after a very low number of plays? What if it won twice in a row? Would the plays be reset because it isn't representative anymore? Or should it be left up to give a different message?
The thing that annoys me most about the lottery is the tradeoff between risk and reward is so dumb as to become actually dangerous. The linked site says the Eurojackpot has a 1 in 139,838,160 chance of a jackpot and a payout of €10,000,000, where for most people a payout of €50k-€250k would be completely life changing and I expect there exist risky bets/gambles/investments which would give you that payout for much better odds.
Not to mention that once your winnings goes over a certain threshold the chance that you end up dead from bad choices or straight up murdered seems to skyrocket.
I genuinely meant that lottery winners got murdered at a noticeable higher rate. However I can't find a good source for that belief now. So I'm happy to drop the belief.
Nevertheless, here's an article from an untrustworthy looking site!
In Europe, or at least in Germany, they don't name drop. If the jackpot was very high, like >100M you can sometime hear in the news something like "the win goes to nord Bavaria." But that's it.
The winners even get schooled on how to stay low. Only talk about the win in the family. Open an new bank account in a big city and not at your village bank. Don't immediately quit your job. Don't invest in shady shit etc.
If you self select to be public about it, that is on you. And there are people who do. Most talk about it after they have lost a lot of money and are in debt now. They thought they are set for life. So they raise their living standard drastically. Give out big gifts etc. And "suddenly" 10M isn't that much money anymore. :-)
But yea, I agree that lottery is stupid. Put the money on savings.
This is the experience of the lottery for a single person so the chances of winning is low. But lotteries are played by millions. Simulate that experience.
I think people understand the odds are small. However, perhaps they perceive their chances of meaningfully turn around their life in other ways have even smaller odds. i.e. improbable vs actually impossible. At least the lottery doesn't care about your current circumstance and everyone has an equal (equally small) chance.
Secondly, because everyone realizes the chances are small, the real product being sold is Hope. Even the advertisements for the lotteries address this. The thing you're buying is 30 seconds of daydreaming so you can comfortably tackle the rest of the day.
I’m at the point where I take it as a red flag when someone doesn’t understand this, and instead bangs on about “low odds” and “the idiots that think that they’ll win”. A combination of superficial booksmarts, a misplaced sense of elitism, and a very real lack of emotional intelligence, that I know that I don’t enjoy being around. There’s definitely a low end on this bell curve, but I think that your average Joe Blow off the street has about as good an undemanding of the chances of winning the lottery as you or I. Which is to say that we’re all definitely flawed in our ability to intuitively comprehend very large numbers, but not uniquely so. It’s just nice to feel like something good might possibly be coming your way. It’s about hope, exactly as you say. I’m barely even an occasional gambler, including the lottery. The one or two times where I’ve bought a ticket, it was worth the $10 or whatever I paid, which I truly do not miss an iota and never have. It’s a game. Anyone who doesn’t get that is deranged.
There's a difference between buying hope, and decreasing the quality of what you do have significantly for false hope.
The hope of winning the lottery is essentially false hope, but false hope is better than nothing, that's true.
But look at LatencyKills post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46474645 if someone is buying 100s of dollars worth of lottery tickets that's a real problem, I'm sure you understand that with your mention of the $10 you spent, but you should consider the people who sneer and get upset about people buying lottery tickets might not be people who care much about 10 dollars but rather people who grew up with caregivers that spent all the money coming into the house on false hope.
> There's a difference between buying hope, and decreasing the quality of what you do have significantly
You are making the same category error that the parent is talking about. It’s not a rational risk/reward calculation.
It’s more like a compulsion / addiction to the soothing / hopeful feeling that people feel for a few minutes when they think about the problems in their life that would be alleviated by winning.
Remember that the lottery is effectively the same game that used to be called “running numbers” when mob families ran it in the 20th century. The government though encouraging gambling addiction at the time was not worth the social costs. Now those costs are apparently the fault of the addict / family and not the government/ lottery contractor.
And I feel you're making the same category error that I was responding to, that is to say it may not be a rational/risk reward calculation, but people who indulge in a small bit of irrationality are having fun and people who indulge in large bits of irrationality significantly damaging their already damaged finances have a problem.
>Remember that the lottery is effectively the same game
I believe running the numbers was guaranteed never to pay out significantly because it was rigged, the lottery is just statistically against you.
> the lottery is just statistically against you
The lottery is not legal in all 50 states. IIRC Alabama still considers the lottery to be morally problematic, which is the same reason it was not legal during the “running numbers” days.
Or they might just be sneering because they are emotionally incompetent book-smart jerks, like my brother. He has absolutely no personal experience of financial hardship and doesn't believe there is any explanation except stupidity for someone spending $10 on lottery tickets before they've fully funded their 401k for the year.
I believe that category was already handled by the comment I was responding to, which effectively said anyone who sneered at the lottery was like your brother without taking into account the subset of people I pointed to.
I'm not sure what percentage of people that talk about the lottery being a tax on stupidity do so because they have been personally traumatized by its effect on their family, or seen its effects on others, but I do believe it is the ones like your brother who seem to get most of the press.
It was - it sounded like your comment was arguing with the one you responded to, by suggesting that they are misidentifying the attitude of the people they are talking about.
yeah I wasn't saying they are necessarily misidentifying the attitude of the people they are talking about, only they had it as a blanket identification of anyone saying negative things about buying lottery tickets as being uncaring jerks, so I wanted to point out there are probably also people in that group making the statement who have a more nuanced view.
On cue, you demonstrate exactly what the previous poster was talking about. Every single HN user understands how the lottery works. I wish I knew an alternative word to "mansplaining".
My brother left school after ninth grade and struggles financially — he can’t afford basic health insurance, yet he’ll spend $100 on lottery tickets whenever possible.
I understand the utility he’s purchasing: a temporary sense of hope. What concerns me is the implicit misunderstanding of probability. The difference in expected value between purchasing one ticket and fifty is statistically negligible. This isn’t about elitism — it’s simply about recognizing orders of magnitude and the arithmetic reality of vanishingly small odds.
The difference in expected value between purchasing one ticket and fifty is 50x! Buying 50 tickets is 50x as bad as buying 1 ticket.
My uncle was for the longest of time a gambling addict, and would buy lottery tickets. It was disheartening seeing him ruin his life over this "hope".
I certainly don't doubt that my uncle also felt a strong sense of "hope" when he bought his lottery tickets, but for what differed a lot. My uncle would buy lottery tickets in the hope of regaining the amount of money that he had lost to gambling, while you probably buy them in the hope of having a significantly higher quality of life if you win. One is financially a very bad decision, the other is not (as bad).
Personally, I would never buy lottery tickets. Not because the chance of you winning is small, but because you're supporting a predatory system that attacks those that are the most vulnerable to gambling: those who've already lost large amounts of money. I hate the gambling industry and the damage it causes to regular people.
Luckily my uncle has stopped gambling, but the effects of when he was a gambler are still, sadly, visible.
In all that rant you forget that there's a difference between paying 3$ to buy "hope" and excitement until next week's draw, and compulsively buying scratch cards with abysmal odds several times a day. The latter is a real problem and many jurisdictions around the world allow these predatory games to be sold and advertised everywhere.
I think there's something to be said for separating disdain for the person and disdain for the institution; unfortunately the latter is used as an excuse for the former.
But actually... there really are, IMO, better ways to "buy hope", or for that matter positive feelings, many of which actually have positive EV (even if not financially), and it is in my opinion a systemic flaw that we use well-known exploits in human psychology to take money from, statistically, the people who have the least.
There is a place for everyone. We need the elitist, number crunching nerds to remind us that it's bad odds and the gambler to show us that you can find enjoyment in the simple things.
All gambling is buying hope. The lottery has the worst gambling odds I've ever heard of, so I don't understand why we're defending it.
It's mainly about showing how low the odds actually are. I think everyone understands they are low but it's ridiculous how low exactly.
I think: 1) Like you said, people are buying hope. 2) People cannot fathom this degree of improbability. So, the fact that it's at least possible overrides the near-impossibility of it. 3) There is some aspect of entertainment and social-interaction to it. It's a bit like watching sports. Who you're cheering for is irrelevant, and whoever wins doesn't change your life in any way, but still, we watch it.
The social aspect is real. The only time I've seen anyone in my family buy a lottery ticket was when one of the jackpots got big enough to become headline news. Mum bought a ticket just to be able to talk about it (and had a chat to us about probability and gambling).
I spend about $10/year on scratchers since I like the causes they support. But most of the volume that I see being bought at the corner store down the street comes from folks who really don't appear to understand the odds.
I know people in the neighbourhood/street I was born, who still live there (well over 50 years in the same house) who bought the postcode lottery tickets since forever, 12x a year, never won anything; this year it fell in the adjacent area code... It must hurt.
What does it mean - adjacent area code? They can’t play anymore?
It means they nearly won but sadly didn't. So close yet soo far away.
In the Dutch postcode lottery, they draw a random postcode (roughly a street) and everyone that lives there and has a ticket wins. The wider area code (village level) win smaller prizes.
People get FOMO - what if my neighbors become millionaires but I didn't have a ticket?
And in this case, some code very close to theirs won. It makes it seem you missed out by a tiny margin.
Seems a clever marketing tactic to rope in more people.
How do you confirm address? ‘I moved home to my parents last week’ etc.
You have to buy a ticket - presumably you have to commit to an address somehow at that point, so people can only buy for one postcode even if they're lying. Unless there's a skewed outcome that shouldn't really matter. (And if there is a skewed outcome...the people who'd bought the winning postcode and didn't have a house on that street would be under heavy scrutiny!)
Apparently, at least in NL, you can buy for different postcodes even though most do not.
> At least the lottery doesn't care about your current circumstance and everyone has an equal (equally small) chance.
Not really true. If you have more money you can buy more tickets which leads to higher—or even certain—odds.
https://www.iflscience.com/how-a-man-won-the-lottery-14-time...
> If you have more money you can buy more tickets which leads to higher—or even certain—odds.
I don't think there are any lotteries with that feature. You can guarantee that you win, but you still won't have certain odds because the payout isn't guaranteed.
> I don't think there are any lotteries with that feature.
It’s in the link I posted.
Did you try reading the only other sentence in my comment?
No need to get upset. I replied earnestly, I thought you might’ve skipped it.
The point I was making is that with more money you increase your chances to win. The fact that you may have to split the winnings isn’t relevant, you still won. I was explicitly responding to the “the lottery doesn't care about your current circumstance and everyone has an equal (equally small) chance” remark.
> I replied earnestly, I thought you might’ve skipped it.
So... you didn't read the second sentence of my two-sentence comment? Or do you have some theory where "you can guarantee that you win" means it isn't possible to guarantee that you win?
> The point I was making is that with more money you increase your chances to win. The fact that you may have to split the winnings isn’t relevant, you still won.
And here, you're still wrong. You can guarantee that you "win" the lottery instead of "losing" it. But if you're going to be buying seven million lottery tickets, it matters quite a lot whether you end up buying seven million tickets at a dollar each and making $1.05 per, or buying seven million tickets at a dollar each and making $0.52 per or $0.35 per. Collecting a jackpot by losing five million dollars is not a "win" in any sense that's not internal to a lottery department, including the sense of people who like daydreaming about winning the lottery.
> I was explicitly responding to the “the lottery doesn't care about your current circumstance and everyone has an equal (equally small) chance” remark.
Note that everyone also has the same chance of buying out the lottery at a profit - it's not necessary to buy those tickets out of pocket, because you can do it with investor backing. The story in your link is the story of someone who bought out a lottery with investor backing. He's not alone; other people also buy out lotteries using money they didn't provide. This is one of the easiest investor pitches you can give.
It’s disconnected from reality to believe anyone can get investor money to buy this amount of lottery tickets. Most people, even if they realise the odds, wouldn’t even know where to start.
But you’ve already locked yourself into an incorrect preconceived notion of the original point (which is simply: “not everyone has an equal chance on the lottery, though on the surface that may look like the case”) and are for some reason getting angrier with each response, so I don’t think we’ll get anywhere here.
Another aspect is that in many states, a large portion of the lottery goes directly into public good programs like education: https://www.powerball.net/distribution-of-revenue
All the players know that the odds are horrible, but in the end someone does win.
Money is fungible, every penny going from the lottery to X is a penny not taken from the general fund.
Thus specific funds for X is only meaningful as a minimum funding amount.
This is technically true, but the end result is that if you abolish the lottery (unpopular) you have to raise taxes (even more unpopular) to replace lost revenue.
Sin taxes work so well at plugging funding gaps specifically because they are optional.
That and they are taxing the poor and under educated who are least likely to complain.
Making things explicit such as stamping a “45% Tax” on lottery tickets really changes people’s perception. The Trump administration almost flipped out when Amazon considered explicitly adding tariffs to people’s checkout.
> The Trump administration almost flipped out when Amazon considered explicitly adding tariffs to people’s checkout.
I wish they called their bluff and did it as it’d force Amazon to show the country of manufacture.
> it’d force Amazon to show the country of manufacture
I don't think many people would care.
I’m reminded of that company that added a Made in USA option of their product that you could select next to the normal price and nobody would buy it at any price premium.
Like, literally nobody.
I wish I could remember where that blog post was, I think it came up on HN.
That experiment had an 85% price premium said the item was identical and some people still added it to their cart.
Saying people wouldn’t pay any premium is very different than saying they won’t pay an 85% premium.
Probably this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43787647
And they would also have to believe that their education system in its current form would have been even worse without the lottery.
30 seconds? I can daydream in bed for an hour for nothing.
I've always assumed this was correct in a way.
Humans do a poor job estimating extreme odds. 0% chance or 100% of a high risk/reward event. How many people in rural areas are prepping for a Carrington Event-sized solar flare or nuclear war, but a car accident or cancer diagnosis and resulting medical bills would sooner and statistically more likely to ruin their lives? Many. They see the small chance of survival as being high reward, with low risk.
Likewise, the lure of a 100% chance of life-changing material wealth that takes the low risk of $2 fits the same mold.
Sure, I'll grant you that. But then explain this: Why is it that, whenever I tell people who are about to play the lottery, to pick the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, they say "that's crazy, the numbers will never come out in a row like that"?
Until someone says "you know what, what the hell, that's as good a pick as any", I'm going to go with "they don't know how small the odds are".
If 1 through 6 are drawn you'd probably have to share your winnings with many more people than most other combinations.
Given how much people are avoiding 1 through 6, I think you'd probably be better off picking that.
This is interesting but IMO it's very likely to be chosen more often than average.
If you choose a random number, then for each other player your chance of picking the same numbers as them is the same as your chance of winning: in the case of Powerball, 1 in 292,201,338 = 0.0000000034. If you instead non-randomly choose 123456, then for each player that actively avoids 123456 your chance of picking the same numbers as them only decreases by 0.0000000034 (from 0.0000000034 to 0). But for each player that actively chooses 123456, your chance of picking the same numbers as them increases by 0.9999999966 (from 0.0000000034 to 1).
We could model this more precisely by looking at the other players' choices as semi-random with some combinations weighted higher and some lower, but you see my point: even if lots of people are repelled by 'obvious' sequences like 123456, this can be outweighed by a very small number being attracted to them.
I do see your point, but I doubt this probability analysis was done by the people who say "what? The numbers will never be drawn in a sequence like that". It's not that they want to avoid common numbers.
Agreed! I don't think it undermines your original point, and IMO the linked site could do some good by giving people a better intuitive sense of just how low the odds are.
I rarely play Powerball Mega millions but when I do, it's fun thinking about how you'd spend (and protect) your winnings. "First I'll pay off that old debt, then I'll buy a new car, then I'll buy that cute house I've been driving past everyday. Then I'll call my boss and tell him to suck a fat one".
Very well said.
The lottery used to be a guage of my level of hopelessness. If I was feeling hopeless I would buy a ticket.
Luckily I haven't bought a ticket for years.
I used to buy one every week.
The odds are really small but so are the cost of playing
Problem is there are people who buy tickets for each and every draw for years.
That amounts for not so trivial amount of money - would be much better for them if they put it in savings account or basically anything else.
My thoughts are that I’m not poor enough for buying lottery tickets to be a tax on me
People chase the jackpots but there are multiple $1,000,000 winners every drawing, 2-3 times a week
At the end of the day, gotta be in the game to win it
I would be really curious to see the money side of this. I am not sure about Powerball, but with EuroJackpot, some of the smaller wins can cover the cost of the ticket (or even cover a holiday!).
It would be really interesting to watch the expected value play out over repeated plays!! I am imagining a running balance where you keep track of total spend versus total returns. Most of the time the balance steadily goes more negative, with occasional jumps back up when you hit a partial match, and very rare big spikes from a larger win.
Very cool project!
Should also include a running tally for the total net profit taken in by the government (after payouts) across all expected ticket sales. That way you can watch your number going negative while the government's balloons up into billions.
This would show the big difference between the Euro and US lottery formats, where (typically) in Euro lotteries, the government takes taxes on the stake and so the jackpot is tax free, whereas in US the prize is taxed as income or windfall. This is one of the reasons why US lottery jackpots tend to be stated as much bigger than Euro ones despite having a larger purchaser pool.
Love the idea. Could also allow the viewer to pick how often they buy tickets and keep track of how much time passes. I think this dimension would help give context to the losses number.
Might hide all this behind the current automatic view with a “play it yourself” toggle.
EV is always negative.
The Selbees would disagree.
I think it would be interesting to have a version where the chosen numbers were the same every time. We all know the odds won't change but there are countless people who play the lottery this way. They have "their" numbers and they never deviate for fear that if they do, that's when "their" numbers would pop up and they'd miss out on the win.
Yes and another that uses a fixed ridiculous combination like 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. This is my favorite way for bringing the odds nearer to mind.
That would be cool for this website, but don't try it in real life. If you win, it is almost guaranteed that you will share your prize with many other people.
When the U.K. lottery launched you picked 6 from 49.
The prizes were shared amongst everyone
If the prize pot was say £10m, 4 winners would get £2.5m each.
I suspect that the hunebr of people choosing 123456 would be far higher than choosing 6 random numbers. Thus in the event your numbers did come up, you would get far less winning than someone who had the same odds but chose say 13 22 32 35 40 42
If anything, I imagine everyone would actively avoid 123456, thus making it the better pick.
It’s the same game. Betting on a pair when throwing two dice has the same likelihood than betting on a six when throwing one die.
The odds may be the same but the game is not the same.
The point of lottery games is to offer the lowest possible probability of winning that has a perception of being winnable.
So guessing few random small numbers feels easier than picking one random large number.
The whole point of the website is to show those games in a context where people without a math degree will get how low the winning chances are.
So the games with the same winning likelihood Are Not the same game.
What people often overlook about lottos is that for a few dollars, you’re buying the chance to dream about a better life.
And that dream lasts right up until you check the numbers.
That’s the part rational investors tend to miss … the power of dreaming.
And I’ll admit it - I play the lottery too, even though I already live a pretty comfortable life.
You're romanticizing, sadly. Every time I see someone scratching off numbers, I see a twisted industry exploiting human hopefulness and naivety. Dreaming costs nothing.
Scratch offs are a different beast than big games like the PowerBall
Gambling addiction is such a crippling disease. There should be accredited gambling laws so people can't gamble what they don't have.
When I see office workers walking off to the dreamer highrise offices in the sky, I enviously dream of being that worker in the sky, with all those dreams of grandeur.
Dreaming does cost nothing.
I play the national lottery in the UK mainly because of the good causes it supports. Athletes competing in the Olympics for Team GB for example receive significant funding from the lottery. I see my ticket as a charity donation with the added fun of an astronomically small chance of winning money.
There's a property website which covers my local area, and every few weeks I'll do a search for the city-center, and sort by highest-price.
It's fun to look at the kinda house you could buy if you had €5 million in the bank. Even though I'd never have that much, and even if I did I wouldn't spend it on such a thing.
That's a habit I picked up when I lived in the UK and I played their national lottery once every month or so.
(/r/SpottedonRightmove/ is also a fun sub if you like this kinda thing; "right move" is a UK estate agents chain.)
Couldn’t the dreaming be done even without betting? This feels like an excuse to me to be completely honest.
I’ve personally had thoughts about what I would do if I were millionaire, and given the amount of stories of people coming into a large sums of money and their life getting significantly worse, I’d prefer to actually not win it.
> Couldn’t the dreaming be done even without betting?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Presumably its easier to dream when there is an unpredictable outcome, rather than knowing you have to wake up tomorrow to spend the day driving around and pissing in bottles. An outside force that could change circumstances is a better feeling than knowing that really isn't any way of changing your career when you can't go to school because you can't afford it.
That law, as per its name, applies to headlines in publications, not literally every question. Otherwise the answer to everything would be “no”.
> Presumably its easier to dream when there is an unpredictable outcome
Anecdotally, I know almost no one who plays the lottery, but almost everyone at some point has shared an “if I won the lottery” dream. Playing isn’t a prerequisite. It’s not too different from dreaming of becoming a rockstar when you can’t even play an instrument. Most of us have some version of that, no money necessary.
What I love about this is how it demonstrates that the waiting is the most powerful part. That week is where a lotto user’s brain does all the work for the lotto corp. The anticipation! The excitement. What if? Oh let’s daydream! Oh the dopamine!
You don’t even have to sell them hope. Just sell them the sensation of hope.
I view buying a lottery ticket as a way to fund the things that the taxes are allocated to while also getting to fantasize until the drawing. I play maybe twice a year. There's near zero chance I'll win. That's not the point. The point is to have that fantasy, just for a moment.
> taxes are allocated to
That gets messy in a hurry. Most of the time time a lottery is introduced to help fund school districts, funding from other sources for those districts dries up. Money is fungible, and the effect is as if the lottery money directly went somewhere other than its earmarked purpose.
Hope is a pretty good thing to have, though. And it's one of the few things many people actually _can_ have. Therefore maybe lotteries aren't so bad after all even if nobody ever wins, and posts like this are actually bad.
Many people come down off that kind of hope when their numbers don’t come up. I’ve seen it. I have friends who felt it. You might perceive it as a sort of loan to get you through the week. But you owe it back plus the $2 interest.
This is a pretty dipshit take.
You must be in the 1% of people who can have that startup dream or have enough money to make investment worthwhile.
No idea where you're going with that, other than it's another dipshit perspective lol.
A few reasons I still play despite understanding the odds. The euro millions also distributes money to charitable organisations, so I see my play as a donation, and that I’m purchasing a day dream.
People still win the jackpot, frequently. Some of those people probably understood the odds too, and it just happened to them, that feeling must be pretty wild.
A few years ago I wrote a script to compare my numbers against all previous drawings. Still didn’t “win”!
Was this data scraped from somewhere? Seems like it would be pretty tedious to manually enter all of the previous winning combinations.
What would be cool is being able to enter a ticket price, and keep a running count of financials to show how underwater you are on a net basis.
Could also change the cadence for tallying purposes (so 1 second = 1 week/fortnight/month) to keep track of how many weeks, months or years one has been doing this for. But that might get depressing!
This reminds me of a (dirt cheap - about 0.5€) scratch ticket available when I was growing up. The number of winning tickets, as specified on the ticket, was 51%. The 2% up from the usual 49% meant you won more than you lost. The smallest prize was about twice the cost of the ticket. We would run to the store on our lunch break, buy a couple of tickets, rinse and repeat a few times, and have money for whatever food we wanted for the day.
(and no, you wouldn't be able to farm them - the store only carried X amount of tickets, and they usually sold out quickly)
I don’t understand how this lotto would make any money.
A limited availability loss leader product meant to normalize lottery tickets to young customers.
Fun fact, at that time the gambling industry was regulated in Sweden, and as such all games (and otherwise - e.g. scratch tickets) was all sold by the government monopoly.
As to the reason why they would have a loss leader in an organisation that actively worked to minimize gambling - beats me.
The scratch ticket was later renamed, and with the rename they reduced the number of winning tickets. It was at 48.5% (or thereabouts) last I checked.
The monopoly has now been abolished, largely due to pressure from digital services.
Oh I see. Gross.
I think for most people, they just think _someone_ will win eventually and you can't win if you don't play, so why not part with some (hopefully) disposable income that could turn their entire life around.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jun/17/can-you...
"Lottery-like" mechanisms for selling homes exist in the UK as "prize competitions" or "house raffles", which operate under specific legal rules to avoid being classified as illegal lotteries. This method gained significant news coverage, particularly a high-profile case in 2017, and has become a growing trend.
Neat. I like that multiple clients get the same websocket data, as opposed to each just running their own simulation. I will be watching https://lotteryeverysecond.lffl.me/wins with interest. ;)
> You are more likely to...get dealt a royal flush in poker on your first hand (1 in 649,740)
This is true but a bit misleading: 99% of people actually playing poker in the US today are playing Texas Hold'em or other variants where "your first hand" contains more than 5 cards and is vastly more likely to have a royal flush. I've had several royal flushes but would not want to think I'm only an order of magnitude or two away from having the luck of a Powerball winner.
Insightful. Similar to worldometers.info. Reminds me of VSauce’s mind blowing YouTube video visualizing how big 52 factorial is.
A useful statistic to include is the probability of becoming a successful business owner, or better yet, the probability of getting a job that pays an annual salary of 200k, 1mil. etc. Maybe that will inspire people to dream more practically.
Another insightful feature would be to emulate playing at the rate of real life (approx. tickets per second in real life).
So you're telling me there's a chance
For me a good way to visualize it is, you get given a key. It works on exactly one of the houses in your entire country, and you get one try (no you cant inspect the lock first and all keys look the same). Good luck trying!
Two large lotteries in my area: Lotto Max: 1:33,294,800 Lotto 649 1:14,000,000
(excluding the smaller pool draws of 5/6, 4/6, etc)
One ticket as the width of a human hair (60-80 µm).
The winning numbers are a hole the width of a human hair.
The odds of winning 1:14m is hitting another hair head on in a line 14,000,000×0.00007 m=980 meters wide. (~840 meters to ~1,120 meters)
The odds of winning 1:33.3m is hitting another hair head on in a line 33,294,800×0.00007 m=2,330.636 meters wide. (1,998 meters to ~2,664 meters)
(calculations by ChatGPT)
If I buy a ticket, it's so I can daydream for myself.
I read somewhere the lottery it's just a tax on poor people. Some people are saying it's about the dream of a better life but dreaming is free.
The odds of winning are so low that I tell people the odds that they will just give me the money even though I bought no ticket can’t be much lower.
The amount of time I spent watching this page is a nice reminder of why I have a rule to never buy lottery tickets.
See also: Simulation Clicker.
I know how my brain works these days.
Why not buy lottery tickets? The only thing smaller than the ridiculously small chance of winning is absolute zero, from never playing. Bad odds are still odds :)
If $DEITY wants me to win, the winning lottery ticket will be dropped by someone and it’ll blow into my car and get lodged onto the dashboard.
If you care that much about statistics you should buy them in the case where the expected value becomes positive every once and a while
I buy lottery maybe once a year when jackpot gets crazy. Not expecting to win - just paying $2 for a few days of "what if I quit my job tomorrow" daydreams. Cheaper than therapy.
Good idea to show the odds. I wouldn’t be able to remember the name to send to someone
Maybe try shouldIplaythelottery.com
The Company has never existed, and never will.
https://archive.org/download/HeliganSecretsOfTheLostGardens/...
So what happens if this wins after a very low number of plays? What if it won twice in a row? Would the plays be reset because it isn't representative anymore? Or should it be left up to give a different message?
It won’t.
Cool website! One minor bug - the Pause button doesn't work for me.
Pagination is also buggy, as the live results interfere with the historical ones.
> Approximately 4.6 years of continuous play, every second, to see a single jackpot win.
This seems pretty reasonable, actually! Somehow it makes the 320M seem manageable.
The fact that someone actually wins the lottery is what’s surprising.
For me, it makes me realize how incredibly large human populations are.
Someone has to win. It might as well be me.
"The Secret" : The electron has to collapse the wavefunction somewhere. It might as well collapse so as to make my wishes come true.
Cool website - but it made me just go play the lotto. Here's hoping I win a million at 2pm GMT
I just saw a 57.1% percent match go by.. That sure would have convinced me to buy more tickets.. :-)
That would only be like $7 in powerball ;)
Lottery working as intended! :-)
The thing that annoys me most about the lottery is the tradeoff between risk and reward is so dumb as to become actually dangerous. The linked site says the Eurojackpot has a 1 in 139,838,160 chance of a jackpot and a payout of €10,000,000, where for most people a payout of €50k-€250k would be completely life changing and I expect there exist risky bets/gambles/investments which would give you that payout for much better odds.
Not to mention that once your winnings goes over a certain threshold the chance that you end up dead from bad choices or straight up murdered seems to skyrocket.
wow, elegantly said, thanks!
Well there are lotteries with lower payout and "a better chance".
...but anyway, are you really arguing that rich people live way more dangerous?
I genuinely meant that lottery winners got murdered at a noticeable higher rate. However I can't find a good source for that belief now. So I'm happy to drop the belief.
Nevertheless, here's an article from an untrustworthy looking site!
https://www.grunge.com/1301397/lottery-winners-murdered/
Ok, so America.
In Europe, or at least in Germany, they don't name drop. If the jackpot was very high, like >100M you can sometime hear in the news something like "the win goes to nord Bavaria." But that's it. The winners even get schooled on how to stay low. Only talk about the win in the family. Open an new bank account in a big city and not at your village bank. Don't immediately quit your job. Don't invest in shady shit etc.
If you self select to be public about it, that is on you. And there are people who do. Most talk about it after they have lost a lot of money and are in debt now. They thought they are set for life. So they raise their living standard drastically. Give out big gifts etc. And "suddenly" 10M isn't that much money anymore. :-)
But yea, I agree that lottery is stupid. Put the money on savings.
Very nice. Would be good if I could enter my own numbers and set it running.
A teacher of mine used to say:
Lottery is a tax for people who don’t understand statistics.
you probably mean "stochastics".
I would translate to: "from a stochastic perspective one can win - from a statistic perspective, its very unlikely"
Lottery is needed, as it finances time travel.
I thought it's there to secretly catch time travelers.
...and fusion!
So you're saying there's a chance?
This is the experience of the lottery for a single person so the chances of winning is low. But lotteries are played by millions. Simulate that experience.
Interesting site. Logic is rather easy, setting you the WEB site to present the results to me is rather hard.
There was a Neal Fun game: https://neal-fun.fandom.com/wiki/Win_The_Powerball
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]