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Friday, August 08, 2003
Super Lotto
Seeing as the jackpot is now worth $90 million, I've decided to go ahead and buy a lotto ticket. My numbers are:
"07 16 29 33 44, Mega 25"
To be honest, they don't look like winning numbers (based on looking at the number pattern), but you never know. If I win, I will take the lump sum and then donate a whole bunch right off the bat. Then I'll give a whole bunch to my parents, some to my friends (you still have time to try and curry my favor..), and the rest I'll save to spend slowly over my lifetime. It's so easy to talk about spending money that you don't even have.
The odds of winning are astronomically low: 1 in 4,969,962,360
Using statistics, we can calculate the expected return of playing the lotto this time to be ($90,000,000 x 1/4,969,962,360) = $0.018 That's 1.8 cents! Considering I spent $1 for the ticket, I would say this is a losing idea (I pretty much threw away $1..enough to buy a decent item at various fast food places). The real winner is the California education system, which (according to the CA lottery website) has received $14 billion from lottery proceeds.
The drawing is coming up on Saturday. You, too, can be like me. I encourage you to go out and donate a dollar to state schools by buying a lottery ticket! =)
2:11 PM Albert
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..a life in DUO