I know everybody is probably sick of hearing that the lotto is a tax on people who are bad at math, but it’s far more deceptive than just a complicated expected value equation. Powerball and Mega Millions advertising the sum total of a thirty year annuity as the value of the jackpot is simply a lie. It is false. No, the Powerball is not $248 million dollars. That’s literally not what the value of the jackpot is worth.
Advertisements are prohibited from being deceptive because people are gullible. If you were selling jars of tomato sauce, and when people opened them up, they find a bunch of tomato seeds, that would be less of a lie than the current promotion for lotto tickets. You wouldn’t be able to say “well, everyone knows that the jars don’t have the sauce yet. Eventually, the tomatoes will grow and you can make sauce with them, or we can plant them for you and send you a few tablespoons of sauce every year.” You’d be laughed out of court and right into jail, because that’s fraud.
You could still have the lotto without the fraud. It would still be a tax on people bad at math. $70 million dollars is functionally equivalent to $248 million, in that it’s enough money to change your life forever. People could still purchase the dream of a better life for $2 each, and most of the same people still would because gambling is an addiction. You could be completely honest about how unfair the game is, and people would still happily play.
And that’s what bugs me about it. It’s so unnecessary. No other casino or gambling establishment could get away with something so transparently dishonest, and they don’t have to while still making money hand over fist.
i’v heard the casinos and lotteries are struggling now, cause the stock market (the original US-casino) is more accessible than ever
never bothered looking into whether that was true or not, just parroting
I mean traditionally the stock market is gambling up to a certain point, after which it becomes a way for the rich to continue getting richer without having to work. You have to make enough money to be able to buy extremely stable investments (like commodities and government bonds) with low dividends in enough volume to just get noticably richer, along with a diverse spread of low to moderate risk to help push the numbers up. The problem is that the initial investments need to be high to do all that.
nah, the stock market was literally started as a casino for rich people. Basically just a way for old money to steal $ from new money.
the point though is…once you realize/understand it’s not a game of chance, that the odds are not 50/50…making $ is incredibly easy. beating 10-15% a year with minimal risk is childs play. there are scaling issues past a certain point, first wall is 100k (when you can get approved for port-margin) after that it’s first million or 2, eventually you start getting reporting requirements and shit, needing to call your broker to make moves etc.
in fact, for those in the know there’s this little game they play where they try and see how far they can take the least amount of money. just as a challenge and to “keep their instincts sharp”. starting with 10-50$'s and seeing how far they can take it.
due to how US markets are (un)regulated compared to the rest of the worlds, the people being milked are pensioners and whatnot buying into the casino mindlessly with each paycheck. seriously, just look at the european market in particular…there’s a reason it isnt nearly as “exciting” as the US’s or Japan’s. they care more about long-term sustainability than incentiving speculation (ie. gambling) like when something gets accepted into the sp500…that’s “time to dump on the zombies/npc’s”. it makes zero sense to buy some <1% dividend from a company trading at 1-200pe but there are loads of those in the big indexes during everything bubbles like this.
everyone in government long-term knows this, especially every republican…that’s why they’re trying to crash the economy. boom and bust “investing” has been turned into a science, in america. they’re just trying to “increase volatility/liquidity” by abusing their positions of power to trigger panic selling/unnecessary hedging.
there’s an old book called Reminiscences of a Stock Operator that lays it out very well, was written over a century ago. it’s kind of like Wolf of Wallstreet, a tongue in cheek behind-the-curtain look at just how corrupt this whole fucking system we’ve built is.
like…i’m not even really an expert at this, no formal training, didn’t go to a business school or anything like that. but with rudimentary understanding of how the
marketcasino actually operates i’m up like 5000% just this last year. have made more the last 3 months than i made the last 3 years working a job…absolutely insane…and i’m not even doing risky stuff like shorting anything, just buying low and selling high.a “crash” is basically when the people like myself, who know how it all works, take $ oit of the system and don’t put it back in (or atleast, don’t put it back in mindlessly).