The prize should hit a limit and be divided into another prize drawing. For example, make $300 million the limit. Still a massively life-changing sum after taxes. When the prize reaches $300 million a new drawing is established alongside the existing one and gets its own numbers for drawing. So now you have twice as many chances to win, albeit one large pool and a smaller, growing pool. Repeat when the second pool reaches $300 million. You could have had 4 simultaneous drawings for the billion+ pot that was just won by a single person.
More people get a shot at a huge sum of money. Seems like a better deal, more winners, more exciting because you get more chances per drawing if there are multiple prizes.
(I’m not encouraging anyone to play if they don’t want to, and pedants need not repeat the odds of winning. Don’t play if you don’t want to, but obviously someone wins.)
I have a better idea, the government shouldn’t be in the business of promoting gambling at all!
Yes, but then how would we logically fund our school system?
/s
Just ban gambling.
Several of my family are addicted and its truly rotten to witness.
Prohibition does not work.
I wonder what the parallel universe is like where instead of a “War On Drugs” campaign there was a “War On Gambling” campaign instead.
Just take a look at underground gambling in states that have attempted to get rid of it.
Here in Texas, we still have gambling everywhere, slot machines in gas stations, card rooms, the lottery, etc.
300 million and a caveat that that’s the amount after taxes, they should calculate that shit for you, and I’d be down with a 100% tax then. “Congrats, you won 300 million” and 300 million goes to the public too, so everyone wins in a way.
Agreed, 1 bil is too much for any person, 300 mil is plenty. You get a 30 million dollar home, and then say 100mil for taxes for the duration of your life and staff to keep it up. Set aside, oh, 1 mil for just random expenses, and then you put the rest in the market with an actual advisor and you never need to work again in your entire life.
I mentally divide any lottery prize by 50% to approximate the lump sum.
Or just make it tax free like other countries already do.
The thing is, the reason it gets so high is because it has the potential to get so high. It’s the powerballs selling point.
I’d suspect if someone made a lottery using your system, it would be less popular and wouldn’t actually have the situation occur since less people would fund it.
The powerballs bananas numbers it can scale up to us exactly what makes it so popular and able to scale so high. Everyone collectively has agreed that poeerball is the primary lottery to pitch into with everyone else.
I think if you set up a theoretical test where you have a bunch of people together, and a bunch of lotteries they can gamble on each week, you’d quickly find after a few weeks everyone would be gambling at the same lottery, give or take.
That’s like saying nobody would want to run a big company or become an entrepreneur unless the payoff was always outrageous. I sincerely doubt that. I’ve played the lottery when it was 20 million because even 10 million post-tax is a huge amount of money. It’d be perfectly fine if less people played and the people who chose to got a better shot at winning.
Apples and oranges.
Itd only be comparable if everyone had an equal chance of becoming the sole owner of a company via random lottery, simply by joining the company.
In which case, yes, most people would congregate to the largest companies to min max their odds.
You can’t really compare anything else to a lottery because a lottery is truly a level playing field, it’s pyre chance.
Any other comparison introduces tonnes of variables like status, gender, orientation, religion, wealth, etc etc.
It isn’t a literal dice roll if your company you start succeeds or not, you can’t just go pay a fee to start a company, kick your feet up and there’s a pure 1 in x chance it makes it without you doing anything.
But that is how a lottery works. You buy the ticket, you wait, and you either win or lose by chance.
And most importantly your success scales by how many others participated.
So you end up with the majority of people congregating to a select few lotteries because they all want to win The Big One TM.
- said no one who won a billion dollars
There’s are plenty of people who have won millions / hundreds of millions in the lottery and were initially thrilled, but later profoundly regretted getting all that money. If you’re not prepared it will fuck up your life. Even if you are mostly prepared it often still fucks up your life.
So then you agree that limiting it to ops proposed 300million would do nothing. :D
I would also take the challenge.
Half billion or thereabouts after taxes.
It would be an interesting draw. “Be one of 100 new $10 millionaires, and live a charmed life on $400K per year forever”. (Assuming 4% rule.)
Lol, who is this opinion unpopular with aside from maybe the handful of people who actually won it.
Quite a few people, apparently. I’m guessing they didn’t bother reading the text and just voted based on the title
I posted it a different time and a different place and was pretty roundly told it was a shitty idea. So I figured it wasn’t a popular opinion.
