Yes, I bought a Powerball ticket on a whim*. No, I am not winning the $700 million Powerball tomorrow. And certainly if I win it tomorrow anyway I will not spend it on hookers and cocaine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvE84AGMWpE
Now, if I do win will I find this guy and slip him ten grand, no questions asked, out of sheer respect for his fearless technique for making an annoying reporter disappear? …I decline to dignify that question with a response.
Moe Lane
*Somebody is going to win that prize eventually. It won’t be me, but somebody will. And that person will never have to listen to another person go Well, you shouldn’t buy lottery tickets ever again. The chance of having that happen was easily worth the two bucks.
Lawrence from Office Space:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A939QRRSNV4
Come on Moe – embrace the healing power of “and”.
I did the math a while back to figure out how much the lottery has to be for me to be able to retire and easily live on the lottery money for the rest of my life, and I only ever buy a lottery ticket when the amount is more than that. Furthermore, I never go out of my way to buy a lottery ticket, just on general principles, and I never ever spend more than $5 on any given lottery.
Yeah, it was a combination: 700 million and it was 2 bucks and I had 2 bucks in my hand after buying my kids slushies.
With the unspoken additional fence of “have to become aware that the jackpot is pretty big” .. yeah.
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That said, one of the uncles-in-law routinely buys scratch-and-win tickets for the kids for Christmas. That’s their gift .. lottery tickets.
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Mew
I figure a couple million after tax should be plenty to live on. I’m not going to bother to estimate better than that.
But when I worked in a c-store, I used to jokingly ask a few regulars, “what, $5 million’s not enough for you?” when the lottery jackpot was small.
2 bucks is a cheap price to pay for a dream. The pleasure fantasizing about it can easily be considered worth the minor expense of an occasional purchase.
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So long as you can afford to sacrifice two bucks, that is.
Sadly, those that can’t, are often the lottery’s best customers. And they buy a whole bunch of tickets at once.
+1 to all of that. That was everything I was going to say pretty much exactly how I was going to say it 😉
I put money down in a two man office pool. The only time I ever play Powerball is when the rewards are that high and ti would be worth the risk of having to explain to my employer why I suddenly have a lot of money in my account.
I’ve said that I would do some real good with that money, by randomly blowing gaming Kickstarter projects out if the water with money.
“Oh, Robin Laws/Rich Burlew/Steve Jackson, you need $20k for the initial print run and art? What can you do with $5m?”