It's not stupidity to play lotteries if the value of the prize means a lot to you and the value of the stake means little. It's the textbook example of "Utility Theory" from Economics 101!

For most people, if they lose $2 from their pocket in loose change it's worth so little to them that they literally WON'T EVEN NOTICE that a few quarters have rolled away (if you don't believe me, check down the back of your sofa :-) ).

On the other hand, even a share of $500 million is self-evidently life changing.

Giving up something with ZERO value in exchange for even a SMALL chance to win something life changing IS a good gamble.

However, if all the money you have for food for the week is $10, suddenly $2 means a lot to you, and so buying the food not the ticket becomes a no-brainer.

So to me, unless you're very poor rather than just poor, buying one Powerball ticket isn't so stupid.

"I tell them that I'll teach them everything I know and they can get a badass job with that knowledge"


I will take you up on that offer...

Ok. Chapter 1 in my course starts with acquiring parts from craigslist for free to build ourselves a computer from scratch. In Chapter 2, we will install Linux on it and configure it. In chapter 3, we will install LAMP and build a 3 tiered web app. And then it starts getting fun.

I'm serious, that alone is worth $50-60k and I'll keep teaching more after that.

"It's not stupidity to play lotteries if the value of the prize means a lot to you and the value of the stake means little. It's the textbook example of "Utility Theory" from Economics 101!"


Ding Ding Ding. We have a winner!

Wrong again Karl.

I by the way need 550 million smackers. That would be just the perfect number of smackers to make me content. If I win I'll be moving to the least inhabited place in Hawaii I can find.

Jota - on bottled water. A friend of mine did a college paper on bottled water for a business class. He was laughed out of class by his instructor and the class. His instructor said it was the single worst business idea he had ever seen. This was at NW Louisiana in about 1979. I wonder if that professor ever thinks of that.

i'm in for 1 ticket for my fair share of the stupid tax.

Jota...I can already do everything but your "build a 3 tiered web app" bit. Never been offered more than entry-level pay for any of my multi-year skills. When, in your course, do you teach where to get an offer above a shoeshine-boy's pay?

Quote:

But if you're old and feeble and not entirely with it, then the odds of your going from poor to well off, are vanishingly small. Those were the people I was thinking of; probably because those are the only people I've known who buy lottery tickets. And I affirm that that IS their only likely chance at affluence. And that therefore it is rational for them to play.

You may be right. Though I would argue that maybe such people squandered their chance to be well off when they were younger, and maybe they don't deserve to be well off.

While in our current system of crony capitalism there are certain people who are "more equal" than the rest of us (to paraphrase Orwell), most of us have the same chances to become successful and at least be "well off enough."

I came from parents who got pregnant and married young, so neither went to college. I didn't grow up hungry, but we certainly weren't well off either. I was born pretty intelligent (so maybe won the genetic lottery a bit), but I also worked hard, did well in school, and received scholarships. I then studied in a field in college that I knew I could do well in, computer engineering. I'm careful with my money and have never gone into credit card debt. My only current debt is my mortgage.

I am certainly not rich, but well off enough to have more or less whatever I want. But I don't want to drive a Ferrari or have a huge house on the ocean, and I only just bought my first flat screen TV (on which I got a great deal on Black Friday.) I think anyone like me who earns enough not to want for much then becomes much less consumption-driven.

A friend of mine who also was smart and did well in school chose a less lucrative field and he is still living essentially paycheck to paycheck, with credit card debt, and his primary joy in life comes from purchasing things he really cannot afford. His only source of savings comes from what the government holds for him when he gets his tax return, a concept I find ridiculous and laughable. Of course when I tell him he could just save that money himself he acts as if I asked him to jump to the moon. Sadly I think most of America is like my friend.

IMO folks can spend _their_ $$ on whatever they want. As long as they can't use the EBT, it's fine with me. In for $10, if only so I could buy the rights to _Firefly_ and get it back in production as an internet-downloadable series.

Rj, the "3 tiered app" actually has many parts to understand in order to do it right. And that's what will get you the job. But it's not rocket science. Baby steps.

Never played it once.

Any high school kid should know that the odds are a lot better with roullette or even slots.

Quote:

When, in your course, do you teach where to get an offer above a shoeshine-boy's pay?

If you already have some computer skills, learn Ruby on Rails and you can then pretty much write your own ticket.

I never have to look for work, it generally comes to me, and I generally don't work more than 25 hours a week.

But I also take great pride in my work, I've been doing this for a long time, and I'm involved in my community which frequently is where my work offers come from.

If you are anonymous guy number 500 who knows basic Linux or PHP, yeah, you aren't going to get great offers.

Also to get back on the topic of this Ticker, I think counting on the lottery to be well off is definitely stupid. A pretty large number of the people who actually do beat the odds and win then either quickly blow it all, or have other bad things happen:

http://www.money.co.uk/article/1002156-h....

I think it makes logical sense that someone who was not able to manage their money before won't get much better at it after winning the lottery.

Quote:

In for $10, if only so I could buy the rights to _Firefly_ and get it back in production as an internet-downloadable series.

I sincerely hope you win just for that alone! :-D

Quote:

If you are poor, and don't play the lottery, you have NO chance whatsoever of becoming well off.

Absolutely untrue..I grew up poor..doing quite well now and expect to be very well off in the next 2-5 years

I stopped by the convenience store today to get a few gallons of gas. You folks convinced me to buy $2 worth of lotto tickets for tonight's play. First time in about 15 years. I picked my own numbers so I can't blame the poor $8/hr register pounder behind the counter after I lose. The lotto money in my state goes toward education. So maybe my contribution will buy a few flash cards for some non-english speaking kid.

Winning the lotto is the last thing I'd want. Positive psychology talks about "flow," which is the state in which the human animal is the happiest. And nothing energizes the spirit and focuses the mind better into flow than the challenge and accomplishment of earning a livelihood.

What am I going to do with half a billion, veg out to Oprah all day? Build ships in bottles? Take up crocheting? Waddle over to the park for a game of chess? Blah. No thanks.

It ain't the money, girls. It's the journey.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psy....

I participate in a long standing office pool that only buys tickets when it is over 200 million and it has cost me $200 over 7 years. I also put $4 into another office pool for tonight. Why? Because I do NOT want to be the one left behind to do the work!

At least it's a stupid tax you can opt out of.

If I go to the store and gamble by buying lotto tickets the government thinks I'm a great guy for helping to fill the public trough. But if I go to a sports bet website and wager a few bucks in the Alabama-Georgia game this weekend I'm a POS criminal. Funny how that works.

"But I don't want to drive a Ferrari or have a huge house on the ocean, and I only just bought my first flat screen TV (on which I got a great deal on Black Friday."

Raxon, that's so funny. We just got our first flat screen TV!!! Last month. Our 16 y.o. cathode ray tube T.V. was too blurry at the bottom for my husband to read the sports scores.

"If you are poor, and don't play the lottery, you have NO chance whatsoever of becoming well off."

Okay, okay, I'm sorry I wrote that. I had in mind a particular thing when I wrote "poor." I was thinking of people like my husband's half paralyzed aunt Hattie in the nursing home. Or my cousin by marriage in the Midwest who is genuinely disabled by years of manual labor in nursing homes and school kitchens, and truly not innately bright. Or a different relative who is about 70 y.o. and blows through every penny that comes in. None of these ladies is going to become rich, unless she wins the lottery. Sorry, that's just the case. I wasn't making a claim about what a lot of people might be capable of, if they showed some initiative.

Won a quarter share in the pools in 1978 paid off my mortgage at age 33. We did not win the top prize but were the only ones to get the next one down.Won a car six years ago in a raffle for the bushfire brigade.

right now in the US, you're free if you have enough money.

I suspect for a lot of people there's simply the allure of freedom. not for sloth, gluttony, or whatever. just freedom and the thought of who else they could free.

You know the ST: TOS episode The Galileo Seven"? Where Spock, having exhausted every option with a reasonable chance of getting his shuttlecraft crew back home, jettisons and ignites the fuel that could have bought them a few more minutes before their inevitable incandescent reentry, taking an illogical, million-to-one shot that the flash would register on the Enterprise's sensors and get them rescued?

It's kind of like that.

Stupidity taxes are the best kind because

1) They are voluntary and I'm a libertarian
2) They take stupid people's money which would otherwise be spent on equally stupid other stuff.