DP wrote:tubajon wrote:"Impossible to win the lotto since I don't buy tickets.
The odds wouldn't improve if I DID buy tickets."
Well, the odds would improve if you bought one ticket per year. Buying 0 tickets one has no chance.
Not really, but its clear you know nothing about odds-making, let alone statistics or even basic math
but go ahead and piss your money away buying lotto tickets, after all "
everyones doing it!"
You're overstating it, though not by much. If one buys no lottery tickets, the chance of winning is zero. If one buys even one lottery ticket, the chance of winning is non-zero. That was the point being made, and it's true.
It's probably worth a dollar once in a great while just for fun, and I've certainly pissed away dollars on things less likely to provide a dollar's worth of entertainment value. I suspect that's true for all of us, even those who are in the deepest financial struggle.
The idiots are those who buy lottery tickets thinking they are making an investment. The likely return on that investment is zero, but the best case scenario is pretty good. Unfortunately, the probability of the best case senario is about 0.00001%. Bloke's got his calculator set for too few digits in the display.
But we occasionally buy a ticket for sheer entertainment value. Thought we won once (the Redhead misread the ticket she'd bought in Texas six months earlier, which showed the winning number from the previous drawing; I was traveling and didn't see the ticket). We spent a whole night worrying about how it could ruin our lives, and finding a mechanism for keeping it secret so that we would not lose all our friends, few of whom had grown up with the necessary training for how to be close friends with wealthy people. (Let it be said that I was up for the challenge.) We were relieved when we discovered the mistake.
But it's fun to think about what we might buy that is beyond reach, versus what we make do with that is not. Frankly, I'm not sure what I'd buy. I can think of a couple of interesting instruments I'd like to own, but they are already owned and not necessarily available. I might seek out a rotary kaiser, or maybe one of the new F tubas on the market. But in general I feel very fortunate to have the instruments I do, which are already far better than I deserve on musical terms.
Rick "who'd much rather have Bloke's workshop than another tuba" Denney
