Way OT: Powerball now up to $800M

I am buying my first one tonight. Only the 2nd lottery ticket I have ever boughten. Try to avoid it.

I don't play buy state lottery tickets.  It's completely corrupt for the government to prohibit most people from running a gambling business then allow a select few to do so based on their race, political connections or wealth and then to top it all off,  start its own gambling operation.

And  to add insult to injury, the government falsely advertises an $800 million jackpot when in reality, it's a small fraction of this after taxes and if paid out right away rather than many decades.

And the poorest people buy the most lottery tickets and often piss away what meager income they have.

Yeah, that's about as corrupt and unethical as it gets.

And you have a greater chance of being hit by lightning than winning the lottery. So if you win the lottery, you better hope your luck doesn't even out.

Gotta love self righteous people telling other people what to do with their money.......

I like the random thresholds in people's minds that the jackpot has to cross to get them to play. Now there are people saying things like, "Well, now that it's $800 million, I've got to play."  As though the previous jackpot of $400 million or whatever was chump change.

Buy a computer generated ticket, don't look at it.  Avoid all future news about PB drawings and results.  So long as you never know what happened you can live your life knowing that you have simultaneously won and not won the lottery.

but I did today.  Gotta spin to win and $2 won't break me.

I have no clue what I'd do with all that money, but I'm sure I can find a way to buy Brian a nice new shiny server and storage rack or all the cloud computing he desires.

when I was tutoring SAT in college. The most common thing I used to hear is "well, someone has to win" (not true, which is why the jackpot keeps going up and is amazing to think about-- you could own EVERY SINGLE TICKET FOR EVERY DRAWING UP TIL NOW AND STILL NOT HAVE WON).

The second thing that used to get pushback from the kids was when I told them they might as well play 1-2-3-4-5-6 or just play the same winning numbers from the last lottery, because the odds were just as likely. Come to think of it, there were a lot of adults who used to say "but that would be stupid." Um, yeah. Like all numbers.

Then I'd mention that lotteries were really just a tax on statistical illiteracy. They usually bought that part, at least.

None of these were as useful as teaching the Monte Hall problem, I'll admit. That still blows the minds of most adults.

I bought in with my office pool.  I think we have like 32 tickets, which is still small, but will be awesome if we end up winning.

A person who has ten Powerball tickets has better odds of winning than a person who has one ticket. An increase in odds, whether small and minuscule... is still an increase in odds. Therefore, it's not necessarily a bad idea to play more than one ticket if you can easily afford to do so.

I bet this hits 1billion before the drawing.  Lines are out the stores today, never seen that the day before a drawing.

Zero.  College statistics made me appreciate how remote a chance a single ticket has of winning.  And I'm not a big believer in voluntary taxation.

Initial reports are that everybody whiffed on this one. If so, Wednesday's drawing is projected to be $1.3 billion, with a $900 mil cash option.