Imagine Winning the Lottery ……

Jax, you should, you probably get lower rates calling from Ireland. 😉

*kapusta*

kapusta: ha! i was ganna make an Ireland comment there! but felt she wouldn’t know what we’re talking about! i was ganna say, hey well i got The Irish Trust Fund! 😉

kapusta: why thank you! 😉

The following is a public service announcement:

The Mega Millions is Jackpot is now $124,000,000 – Next Drawing is Tuesday August 11.

you can play the Mega Millions in the following States:

California, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and Washington.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The PowerBall Jackpot is now $186,000,000 – Next Drawing is Wednesday August 12

you can play the PowerBall in the following States:

Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, U.S. Virgin Islands, Vermont, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

This is my theory…. I win $1 every day of the year…because I don’t spend each day a $1 for a lottery ticket, therefore I win a $1 in my pocket daily!!!!

The lottery is a tax on the stupid. You’re 4 times as likely to be hit by lightning on the way to buying a ticket than to actually win the ticket.

To Senior Moderator-72, here is your reminder to buy tickets for both the MegaMillions and PowerBall (as you won’t be the 1st to win two jackpots in a year)

Here is an AP article:

WICHITA, Kan. – Edward Williams is the definition of lucky after winning the lottery for a second time in a year. Williams, 47, of Wichita won $75,000 in September playing a $10 scratch ticket. Then on Wednesday, he defied the odds again when matched all the numbers in the Super Kansas Cash drawing to win a jackpot worth nearly $900,000.

“When I hit $75,000, I figured lightning struck once, it won’t ever hit again,” Williams said in a prepared statement released by Kansas Lottery officials. “This one knocked me flat!”

He traveled Friday to Topeka to collect his winnings. Super Kansas Cash jackpots are paid in a single cash lump sum. After taxes are withheld, the jackpot is worth $627,541. Also, Yogi’s Grill & Bar in Wichita will be eligible for a $1,000 bonus for selling the jackpot-winning ticket.

“When I won the $75,000, I bought a car and put the rest of the winnings into a CD,” Williams said. “This time, I’m saving it for retirement, which I hope to do at 55.”

Williams, who is single, has worked for almost 17 years ago for Johnson Controls. Before that, he served in the Marines.

Played lottery for 17 years

He said he has been playing Super Kansas Cash, Powerball and other lottery games consistently for 17 years.

“Just keep on playing,” advised Williams, who buys a $5 Quick Pick for every Super Kansas Cash drawing. “That’s the best advice I have for other people looking for that big win.”

Williams isn’t the first repeat lottery winner.

Keith Selix, of Waterloo, Iowa, gained notoriety in 2006 after winning three lottery prizes totaling $81,000.

At the time, he said his fortune mysteriously changed after his wife died, and he was convinced he was being “led from above.”

Ironically, Selix’s wife had often scolded him for wasting his money on the “those cotton-picking tickets.”

your question is answered in blue:

Hoyle and his associates knew that the smallest conceivable free-living life form needed at least 2,000 independent functional proteins in order to accomplish cellular metabolism and reproduction. Starting with the hypothetical primordial soup he calculated the probability of the spontaneous generation of just the proteins of a single amoebae. He determined that the probability of such an event is one chance in ten to the 40 thousandth power. Prior to this project, Hoyle was a believer in the spontaneous generation of life. This project, however, changed his opinion 180 degrees. Hoyle stated: “The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40 thousand naughts [zeros] after it. It is enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.” Hoyle also concluded that the probability of the spontaneous generation of a single bacteria, “is about the same as the probability that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard could assemble a 747 from the contents therein.”

The odds of winning a state lottery are about 1 chance in ten million. The odds of someone winning the state lottery every single week from age 18 to age 99 is 1 chance in 4.6 to the power of 1,029,120. Therefore, the odds of winning the state lottery every week consecutively for eighty years is incomprehensively more likely than the spontaneous generation of just the proteins of an amoebae!

A more detailed estimate for spontaneous generation has been made by Harold Morowitz, a Yale University physicist. Morowitz imagined a broth of living bacteria that was super-heated so that all the complex chemicals were broken down into their basic building blocks. After chemically analyzing the hypothetical mixture, he concluded that the odds of a single bacterium re-assembling by chance is one to the power of 10100,000,000,000. This number is so large that it would require several thousand books just to write it out. To put this number into perspective, it is far, far more likely that each member of an entire extended family would each win a state lottery every week for a million years than for a single bacterium to form by chance, over the estimated age of the Universe, even if all the building blocks were present all over the surface of the earth!

Look at the bright side- if you live in Canada, you don’t have to pay very much to taxes. Then again, everything here is more expensive (probably including flights to Hawaii)

72, maybe if you buy out all the tickets (see the lottery thread to figure out how many tickets you need to buy to get even a 1% chance of winning) and you win, you’ll be able to afford your babysitter 😉

ebay is a lottery that doesn’t cost you anything when you lose, but costs you when you win. Great site makes you lose no matter what:

Consider the MacBook Pro that Swoopo sold on Sunday for that $35.86. Swoopo lists its suggested retail price at $1,799; judging by the specs, you can actually get a similar one online from Apple (AAPL) for $1,349, but let’s not quibble. Either way, it’s a heck of a discount. But now look at what the bidding fee does. For each “bid” the price of the computer goes up by a penny and Swoopo collects 60 cents. To get up to $35.86, it takes, yes, an incredible 3,585 bids, for each of which Swoopo gets its fee. That means that before selling this computer, Swoopo took in $2,151 in bidding fees. Yikes.

In essence, what your 60-cent bidding fee gets you at Swoopo is a ticket to a lottery, with a chance to get a high-end item at a ridiculously low price. With each bid the auction gets extended for a few seconds to keep it going as long as someone in the world is willing to take just one more shot. This can go on for a very, very long time. The winner of the MacBook Pro auction bid more than 750 times, accumulating $469.80 in fees.

This is an illusion. The fact that you have already bid 200 times does not mean that your chance of winning on the 201st bid is any higher than it was at the very beginning. A new bidder can come in at any time and at the cost of a mere 60 cents jump into the auction in which you’ve already spent more than 100 bucks. The money you’ve put in has gotten you no closer to the goal than a losing raffle ticket.

if Jothar doesn’t buy, the greater our chances are of winning 😉

no. the odds don’t change at all. each ticket is an individual chance and there is no guarantee that anyone has to win

72: i got my mega millions tickets today! i better start praying real hard now! 😉

the $260M Powerball had a winner this past Wednesday. Results are pending for the drawing earlier tonight

the Mega Millions did not have a winner. Next Tuesday the estimated grand prize is $252M

Mega Millions ESTIMATED JACKPOT: $325 MILLION

Draw Date: AUGUST 28, 2009

Say half comes off in taxes, and another half of the remainder comes off for getting the prize in one shot. That would leave in the area of 80 million. After supporting every tzedaka, I can not imagine what there is to do with so much money. Even 5 million to win, is TONS!

*kapusta*

squeak

Member

“I suggest a CR pool. Everyone mail your checks to mod central, the mods can buy tickets with combinations of their numbers, and post the tickets here.”

EXCELLENT IDEA! Lets go for it- who’s in charge?

areivim, I’d gladly do it. The logistics of getting the money to me is a bigger problem than I can solve, though.

yeah… now we’re rolling. Bring on the CC #’s- and please remember to email only ONE mod :).

Now for the recipient: you better tune up your server in time for the onslaught of emails

Between 1000’s of us CR members, I’m sure there’s a computer hacker here somewhere…

areivim – that would be illegal.

I think that the machines are just for show and that it’s all fixed by computer. But I don’t really know that.

prove him wrong 😉

Of course it is possible. What do you think determines which scratch off tickets win? What do you think determines when the one-armed-bandits pay out? It’s all computer generated, and it’s not random. There is a sequence. I think it applies to “drawing” numbers for jackpot lotteries, too, but I have no way of knowing if I’m right.

Anyway, this is not relevant. We are trying to organize a legitimate pool. It seems that maybe Joseph was right – everyone has been reading the news too much. This is above board, despite what you may believe people do based on news sources. We are going to buy real tickets. No hacking.