Anyone who knows anything about statistics or bothers to read the fine print that is on the back, by law, of every single lottery ticket that is sold, will see, that it is truly a fool's venture to get involved in the lottery and I personally view it as a tax on the poor.
I know some defenders that will say "oh it's only a few dollars" and I guess, but some people buy more than a few dollars worth every single week when they get paid and over time this is a lot of money that is being stolen from what is likely the poorest members of society. Only the government is allowed to do this too because if you and I set up a lottery that even had better odds than the state lottery, we would go to jail even if we hadn't duped anyone. It's all a racket.
We all to some degree believe that the media is working in lockstep with governments to keep the people stupid or at best, mildly misinformed and brainwashed and if you don't think this yet I challenge you to look at all the conspiracy theories that are coming true that we have been told we were nuts to believe them for the past decade.
Lottery and government are one in the same. There are stories about the entire thing being rigged so that friends of the politicians win them and what not, but instead of doing an Illuminati deep dive let's just focus on the statistical improbability that someone is ever going to win anything of substance and then compare it with the stories that the news lines up to tell us about the same lottery.
This is a fun little story I guess and I suppose it is newsworthy but when I see stuff like this I tend to wonder whether or not it actually even happened. The Maryland lottery is one of the largest in the world and they spend a lot of money advertising it generally speaking. What better way to advertise it than to get your pals in the media to make puff pieces that distort the truth and make it seem like something that is really likely to happen that a person would win twice in 3 months.
At the end of the articles they always get a quote from the winner who always says they are going to continue to play the lottery.
Another story by the same news agregate features a man who bought lotto numbers for the wrong drawing by accident and still won! that very convenient amount of $50,000.
Well done to Ron I guess and good luck on dodging all of your relatives who are going to pop out of the woodwork looking for a handout.
The people who run these games are required by some halfway ignored law to publish the odds of someone actually winning. If you ever hear it advertised on a podcast or something like that a super-fast-talking voice will tell you the disclaimer about how incredibly unlikely it is that you are ever going to win. The odds of winning the biggest prizes, which are normally $10 million to $100 million or even more, is normally around 3 to 5 hundred million to 1. Some idiot I know responded with "that's why you buy more tickets... so you can increase your chances"... sigh.
Even the Gemini explanation of this improbability has been infiltrated by the "ministry of truth" and they really like to focus on the fact that your overall chance of winning is 1 in 8! Wow, that sounds really good until you realize that the only thing you win is another chance to play again for free.
As a disclaimer at the bottom of this clearly manipulated search result summary is this "investing the same amount of money in the stock market will offer far better returns than playing the lottery." Well at least there is a bit of truth in there.
Scratch tickets are more fun, or at least I think they are, but your probability of winning anything of substance on them is still extremely low. Some guy I knew in high school had a family minimart and because he was a punk ass teenager he used to regularly steal dozens of scratch tickets from the store. In all, he probably stole several hundred of them. The biggest prize he got after all of that was $40.
Maybe I am just not a dreamer like a lot of the people out there but to me, the lottery is a scam and almost everyone loses. They have to or the entire scheme wouldn't work. Plus you have to look at how almost every big lottery winner has ended up broke, hooked on drugs, or dead after 5 years of winning.
I wish the news would highlight these sorts of things but of course they aren't going to do that. Just this one page of "news" that I looked at had 5 articles that were eschewing the virtues of playing the lottery. Trust nothing!