How To Read Your Powerball Ticket

From--where else?--FB

Notes on a large Powerball jackpot prize

Literally that, notes on tonight's near-record Powerball jackpot prize drawing:

1) If you were one of 175,223,510 people (you can't imagine that many), standing, say, in the middle of them, and a mile up someone with a paper airplane was to gently push it out over that crowd, that's how likely it is you'd get the jackpot prize;

2) If we must have lotteries for millions--and apparently we must--someone needs to set one up where each winner wins, at most, 1 million dollars. It would spread the prize out over the region and state and nation and do far more good for far more people and it would be greatly less likely to mess people up with such large sums. Could you imagine if 600 people tonight each won $1 million, spread out equally over the entire country? It would do a nation of good, in not a world;

3) If no one wins tonight, it will get perilously close to 1 billion dollars for a jackpot prize Wednesday evening.

That's crazy.

4) If one person only wins this second-largest-ever jackpot prize, it will likely--very likely--screw them up.

That said, when it comes to lots of money, I defer to Mark Twain's quote:

"I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position."

And Dorothy Parker's:

“I don't know much about being a millionaire, but I'll bet I'd be darling at it.”

Good luck campers and have a great weekend.

Spain does it right on a big lottery

If nations must have lotteries--and apparently they must--it seems Spain does it a bit smarter:

Spain's 'El Nino' lottery hands out $1.1 billion

Sure, they handed out a load of money, but instead of just giving it to one winner, they distribute it:

MADRID (AP) — A lottery showered €840 million ($1.1 billion) on ticket holders in five regions of Spain on Sunday, in the midst of a deep recession and high unemployment.

 

The "El Nino" (The Child) lottery is held each Feast of the Epiphany — Jan. 6 — and the top prize tickets were sold in Alicante, Leon, Madrid, Murcia and Tenerife. The lottery's name refers to the baby Jesus, who according to tradition was visited this day by three kings of Orient bearing gifts.

 

The lottery tickets cost €20 ($26), and the most one can win is €200,000 ($260,240). But there's a catch. Thanks to new austerity measures aimed at reviving Spain's ailing economy, anyone who wins above 2,500 euros ($3,250) in the lottery has to pay 20 percent income tax on their windfall.

On Sunday, a cheering crowd gathered outside one ticket office in the southwestern Madrid suburb of Alcorcon where 200 of the winning numbers were sold, totaling €40 million ($52 million) in prize money.

I've written about this before, not that long ago.  Distributing lotteries, if we're going to have them, between more people could and should and would benefit from them, they would be far less likely to get or be really screwed up by such a large windfall of money and, finally, the benefit of the wins would be distributed across more economies, more towns, more cities, more counties and states.

It only makes sense.

Dear God, About that Powerball...

Dear God,

If you're up there (and surely it seems you're not), and if you really do intervene in people's lives down here (again, seems highly, highly unlikely), please, please make sure someone or, better yet, some big group of people who are very responsible and level-headed and intelligent and beneficent eventually wins this big Powerball lottery jackpot prize.

In the first place, it could do a great deal of good for a great number of people all across the nation and even the world, if done right.

In the second place, on the flip side, it could really, really screw up someone's life--or people's lives--if the person who wins it couldn't handle it and we've seen plenty of that in the past.

Just sayin', Lord.

If you're there, please make this make sense.

Amen.

Link: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/millions-chase-record-500m-powerball-175725660.html

A better thing happened with this lottery prize

According to the news this morning, as we all likely know by now, three different winning MegaMillions Lottery tickets were sold this week--one in Illinois, one in Maryland and one even in our own next-door-neighbor state of Kansas. Terrific. Excellent. Congratulations to the winners. And this is what should have happened, too, instead of having only one winner of what would have been a huge windfall. Having three winners instead of just one helps many more economies--the individuals who won, of course, the towns and areas they live in and the states they reside in, at least. Added to that, it's far less likely to "screw up" a person if, again, only one person won all that money. Sure, they could still get "screwed up." It's not like this prize, divided by 3 isn't still huge. Hopefully, it just makes it a bit less likely.

As it stands this morning, we are told the winning ticket in Kansas was sold in Northeast Kansas, a bit vaguely, so the person or persons who won can't be very far away from us, can they? Did you see where we Americans spent $1.5 billion on this lottery, this go-round? Wow. That's a lot of tickets. It's too bad even more people couldn't have all divvied up this prize, by my way of thinking. What should happen with lotteries--with a lottery, anyway--is that they should create one where each time there is a drawing, there are as many winners as there are each 1 million dollars. They could just do a live drawing each time. I think it would be exciting for people and "spread the wealth" far more healthily and wisely. It would be better for the people winning, make the likelihood people would win sooner that much greater and make it that much less likely, again, that people would be overwhelmed by the money and mess up their lives. Instead, polls seem to show people like the excitement of these huge jackpots. So it goes. For now, if you're reading this Mr. and/or Mrs. Kansas Megamillions lottery winner--enjoy. (And keep your head on your shoulders and feet on the ground). Link: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/kan-ill-md-tickets-share-lottery-jackpot-120924228.html

Someone in town is three million dollars richer, apparently

According to a friend's post on Facebook just now, the Royal Liquors store at 103rd Street here in town--Kansas City--sold the $3 million winning ticket that was drawn last evening for the Missouri Lotto Lottery. Start checking those tickets, folks.

Powerball doubling cost

Maybe you heard that already, that the Powerball lottery is going up in price by a dollar--doubling in price from $1 to $2. In a way, no big deal. At least for those who don't play. And that's why I write today--for those who do. First, do you know what the odds of winning are? The odds of winning the Powerball lottery, as their official website will tell you, is one in 195,249,054. Yow. Very nearly one in 200,000. Think about that.

Imagine you're one person, standing in a crowd of nearly 200,000 people, each with a lottery ticket, and someone of authority is going to somehow pick you out of that crowd for whatever reason. In this case, it would be to win that prize. Now, do you see how likely--unlikely, really--that is? And sure someone has to win it, of course, and you can't play if you don't win. I'm just saying, spelling out how extremely unlikely it is, that's all. Not meaning to rain on anyone's parade. Links: http://fox4kc.com/2012/01/02/powerball-prices-double-so-does-starting-jackpot/; http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/pricey-picks-powerball-tickets-doubling-15269485; http://www.powerball.com/powerball/pb_prizes.asp; http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/02/powerball-tickets-to-double-in-price/

What chutzpah

You might have seen this in the news in the last 24 hours:

Defiant lottery winner still uses food stamps

Here's another loophole they need to close.

Thank goodness it's Michigan.

What we've come to

Years ago, when I was a child, reading the back of cereal boxes at the breakfast table, I used to read where the "terrific sweepstakes" was always void in Missouri, etc., etc.

I didn't understand why and for a brief moment, I was mildly disappointed.

I always went back, box after box, to read the same thing.

Years later, I had a somewhat similar experience by visiting other states. We'd fly down the highway and I'd see these big 2- and 3-story signs that said "XXX".

This time, however, I was glad I didn't see them back in my home state.

Honestly.

I thought, because we didn't have those signs and their businesses, we were a bit better people because of it.

Don't get me wrong--I'm no prude. I just thought we didn't need those signs and businesses in our state. I thought it was better without them.

So here we are, all these years later.

We have gambling in Missouri. Big time.

We've got our casinos. We've got our lotteries. We've got lotteries out the proverbial wazoo.

And you know what?

We're not the better for it.

I have a friend whose Father gambled away all of what little he had because we have casinos now. He even lost the family home. And this guy is long past retirement age, I can tell you.

Everything he had--gone.

And those "XXX" signs?

Oh, yeah, we got 'em.

Fly down I-70 and there they are.

We're now no better than Texas. Or any other states with those things.

At one time, we had sense, as a people, of some idea of what was good for us.

And what wasn't.

It's the same way now.

I'm reminded of this today because of a story from the Associated Press, in the Kansas City Star. (http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20081227/4955b650_3ca6_1552620081227-1760989258)

It tells of the bad situation many states are in today with their budgets so they're thinking of everything they can sell off, to cover their deficits.

Sure, some of the assets I can see selling off, like premier golf courses and things like that, including lotteries.

But highways? Tollways? Airports?

If we sell off some infrastructure like that, whatever corporation buys them "has us", if you know what I mean.

They can do, for the most part, whatever they wish with those assets, and so, with us.

We're so impoverished, at least financially--if not morally (and I don't mean to get all pious here, anytime, let alone now)--that we'll do anything to cover our debts.

We should be better than all of this.

We should have stayed better than all of this all along.

History should have and could have taught us to know better.

Lessons on a Monday in February

Lesson one:

Societies shouldn't have mechanisms created that take large amounts of money and transfer them to people of formerly extremely small means. Put another way, it is nearly crazy for a society to have a lottery in which middle class or lower middle class people can win millions of dollars.

It's a mistake virtually always.

It doesn't make sense.

It's a mistake looking to happen.

Wanna' have a terrific documentary? Rush to Georgia right now and start filming the family who just won 270 million dollars in the "Mega-Millions" lottery. It'll be a runaway success. This has tragedy written all over it (unless this family is extremely lucky--or smart).

Lesson number 2: World leaders should NOT hand uncompeted contracts worth large sums of money (read: millions of dollars--again) to friends, colleagues or associates. (See "Day 2" below).

I was right. The contract given to former Attorney General John Ashcroft for between 27 and 52 million dollars, according to the Associated Press, was not competed by the government--yours and mine--that gave it to him.

I wish I had been wrong.