Originally Posted by
YmoBeThere
At $2, is there no entertainment value?
Not $2's worth. Not in my opinion.
If only the lottery could be graphically represented. For example, if there was a large plot ground covered with 176 million marbles (however much land it would take to lay out that many marbles in one layer would work).
Then people would be asked if they wanted to give a guy two bucks for the privilege of walking out somewhere into the vast field of marbles and choosing one of them at random, with the promise that they would be awarded vast sums of money if, and only if, they picked the ONE marble among those 176 million that they had specified ahead of time was valuable. It looks exactly like all the others, though.
I really think that if people could actually SEE and therefore at least somewhat visualize what the odds were, most people would decline.
I thought of this a number of years ago. At a 7-11 near my hospital there is a near-constant parade of people, who, by the looks of things, can probably scarcely afford to throw away money, going into the 7-11 and paying two bucks for a lottery ticket. They get nothing in return. So, here was my idea. I could go there and offer them one dollar for their two dollars. After all, a buck is better than nothing, right? By so doing I would cut their losses in half, giving them a better chance to be able to make ends meet. At the same time, I would earn a 100% return. It's a win-win!
"We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." --M. Proust