You won't win if you do play.

The only time I play is when PowerBall gets to like $150 mil, then I piss away $5 on tickets and daydream about all of the stuff I'd buy for a few days. That's about all it's good for.

(insert your state name)

What has six balls and screws Texans?
The Texas Lottery.

OR

“The lottery is a tax on people who flunked math”

This sounds like a pretty good come back to me.
You answered your own question:)

"well the jerk store called, and they're all out of you"

George Costanza.

"That's the same thing that nice Nigerian prince said in his last email."

Odds for those lotteries are generally in the 1 in 20 million range. Houston has 3 million people in it and it's a big freakin' city. So I imagine 6 Houstons with six times the people, then I imagine God reaching from the sky and randomly touching a single person on the head. There's your lottery winner, and why I don't play. Lotteries are voluntary taxes; no thanks.

I assume the lottery is based on those numbered balls.

Here's a test: http://www.webmath.com/lottery.html

I entered a simple lottery with the following constraints:

You must choose a sequence of 5 numbers correctly to win.
The lowest number you can choose is 2
The highest number you can choose is 55
A given number can only be chosen once per try (per lottery ticket, etc.)

The resultant chance of winning is 1/54 × 1/53 × 1/52 × 1/51 × 1/50 = 1/379,501,200 or one chance in about 380 million.

Now let's say the lottery ticket costs $5 and I buy 1 ticket per week, 52 tickets/ year for say, 20 years. 52 * 20 * $5 = $5,200 spent on tickets.

How has purchasing 1020 tickets improved my odds?

Basically, 380,000,000/1,000 = 380,000. In other words, after 20 years of buying weekly tickets my chances of winning are about the same as dying from a fireworks discharge in the USA (http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm)

Somebody who knows how to compute compound interest from regular deposits can probably provide you with the 20 year investment return from $5/week. I'll bet it's $15k-$20k at say, the S&P 20 yr average change.

oh you know him too, huh? he emails me at least once a week. seems like a nice enough guy.

That IS a snappy comeback, Bot. Now, if only Jentay can remember all of that and rattle it off the next time the subject arises . . .

Yep. He says the lottery is for suckers, and your more likley to break even if you work with him on getting some of that oil money out of country, but you've got to be willing to play.

Do you still have that horse trailer for sale btw, I can have courier delivey of bank check for $8,724.06 for imediiate pay! ONLY IF YOU CAN FEFUND DIFFERENCE CAN WE DEAL MAKE A. God blesses you very much more to make this deal fastest possible by the way. Oh and remember don't by lottery tickets those guys are never paying me.

Busted!

Crap.

Oh well.

That's the kind of argument that works for me. But then... I don't buy the damned things because my chance of winning is about equal to the chance of dying by being frozen to death. And I live in Louisiana.

I invest in several broad-based mutual funds. That's my gambling. And it doesn't look too good this week!

B

Yeah, this week a lottery ticket might have been a better investment.

my brain hurts.....Vanguard Wellington Fund....
did you know there are 281 million people in the US and only 637,000 are pilots?

You and your love of numbers . . . .

Tell them they would be better off putting it into a Roth IRA, over say 40 years it adds up...