Chasing The Uncatchable

There's another one of those huge lottery contests going on here. The prize for tonight's drawing is now past 500 million dollars. But I won't invest even a  single dollar for a ticket, not one cent given the odds of winning are said to be one in 287 million. Lotteries are fool's gold for fools. That's why governments all over the world run the lottery ticket scam.  Those contests appeal to greed and greed is a big motivation for many people.

After the greediest of all entities, the states that have formed as one lottery seller, get their grubby hands on the winner's share they will  take almost 20o0 million dollars of the winnings. The jackpot of those lotteries a is always based on the volume of sales all based on sales, so governments love gambling addicts who throw away their lunch money on dreams of winning.  Of course, almost all will fail to win. The only fix is that the states will always grab their unholy amount of the winner's dough.

A person has better odds of playing in the NBA, 1 in 6.9 million; being a movie star, 1 in 1.5 million; or becoming the president of the United States, 1 in 10 million, than winning one of those big powerballs. Yet, all who buy have the thought in the back of their gambling addicted brain that they will be the one who wins. How can such false hope bloom? It's probably not only greed, but desperation that drives humans to invest in the almost un winnable.

The largest U.S. lottery prize ever was for a Mega Millions game like this lottery was a $656 million jackpot split among three winning tickets in March 2012. Back then, the odds of picking the correct numbers were more than 1 in 175 million. Wow! Such good odds. But of odds, the curious thing about odds in relation to winners of lottery prizes greater than 1 million dollars is that most winners will spend all of their winnings and be "desperate" enough again' in as little as a year from the day they win the big prize. It seems that those lucky enough to win lotteries are rarely smart enough to use their winnings wisely. There is justice in that fact.

May all your hopes and dreams be based on more than winning a lottery.