Everyone Is Entitled To My Opinion

Remember yesterday’s post “A Tax On Stupid People”?  I delivered the unhappy news to win a simple $500 a week for life in the NYS Lottery, statistically, you would have to scratch a ticket every second of every day for 3 ENTIRE LIFETIMES to hit the magic ticket (buying about $8-million dollars of lottery tickets in the process). That was a little disappointing to those of you who had counted on the prize to pay next month’s rent. But the good news was you only had to pay $1 for your moronic delusion. Some dopes pay $30!

Of course the chance of winning the Grand Prize is roughly equivalent to walking around your backyard with a bushel basket waiting for a plane to drop $1-million into it. But even THOSE chances – zillions to one – are better than if you have NO CHANCE of winning.

What’s that?

Yeh, sorry. Sometimes there’s NO chance of winning the Grand Prize. Why?

Because someone may have ALREADY won it. WHAT!?

Think of how it works. Some gerbil-like bureaucratic committee in Albany gets to choose a new Lottery game from the thousands that are sent in by New Yorkers who have too much time on their hands. So they run the numbers through the computers to make sure the odds are so stupidly high, even Paris Hilton could see there’s little chance of  her ticket actually winning. And then they set the run of the new game (say six months to a year) and print the estimated required number of tickets to distribute to retail vendors and start the massive ad campaigns.

BUT THEN some nitwit actually HITS the Grand Prize in the first month of a year-long campaign! (It’s happened any number of times.) Uh-oh. There’s only one Grand Prize and eleven months to go. Now what?

“Well New York pulls the game or announces there is no more Grand Prize to win, right?”

Sure, kid. And the cow really jumped over the moon.

Like me. And you – if you play New York State Lottery Games – or any Lotteries bigger than church bingo. The games have been called “voluntary taxes paid by people who are too dumb to understand odds”. Well I understand odds. My rationale is much more sophisticated than that. I pay a dollar or two to dream of winning and you can’t win if you don’t play. Pretty smart, huh? Naw, not so smart. Actually it’s pretty dumb when you know the odds – which you can find on the NYLottery website.

See the pretty ticket above? It costs a dollar. And $500.00 a week for Life is a pretty good prize, right? So here come the official NYS odds for this dream. We’ll start on the smaller prizes first – get ready to WIN!

The odds against winning $1 are 8.77 to 1. For you non-bettors, that means on average, you’d have to buy about NINE tickets to scratch off a dollar winner. But, as the brighter ones in the group have already figured out, you don’t really “win” a dollar because that’s how much you paid for the ticket. So, OK – to win a dollar, you’ve really got to win $2 on the ticket. Odds against a two dollar ticket? About 47 to 1. WHAT? That’s right, Skippy; to actually win a dollar, on average, you’d have to scratch off 47-tickets.

It gets better, right? Right, this is New York State. To win $10, you’ll have to scratch 200 tickets. $100? Get ready to buy 50- thousand, 400-tickets. That’s a lot of buying and scratching for a hundred bucks. And the Grand Prize? $500 a week for Life? Get your coin out and start scratching. Better make it a few coins, you’ll need to scratch 7,938,000 tickets.

Don’t tell anyone though. It kind of ruins the game if you know it would take almost three entire lifetimes to scratch off enough tickets to win $500 a week for the rest of your life. Plus, about $8-million dollars.

When was the last time you heard anything about our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan?  Obama’s “State of the Union Speech”?  He gave a little flag wave and Congress cheered.  It might have taken about a minute or two of his 1-hour, 9-minute speech.

Major media networks – including Fox?  Well, listen to them.  After sifting through the Haiti earthquakes, our rescue efforts, Toyota recalls, the proposed budget deficits,  debates between Obama and Congress, and who won the Grammy Awards, unless more than a few Americans are killed on any given day, they’re just old news.

Does anyone even remember we have: over 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and over 133,000 in Iraq?  That’s about a quarter of a MILLION troops fighting for,  oh…….whatever…. at a cost of about $1-TRILLION dollars over the last 8-years?

You believed the last President and this one – and then forgot about the troops, didn’t you? I blame both of these guys.  I think they now have an equal amount of  blood on their hands.  But you believed them, didn’t you?  They told you it was a noble cause, right?

Hey, Afghanistan (which has a 75% illiteracy rate)  had a “democratic” election where many votes were delivered from tribal villages on the backs of  donkeys.  It only took a few days and “our” candidate (as corrupt as he is) WON!  Great….

And Iraq?  We whacked Saddam even though today many Iraqi’s think they were better off with him rather than being occupied.

Two unwinnable wars – and all the moderates say we can’t just pull out of both of them immediately -  I forget why.  I think I remember that same argument from the Vietnam years about 1969.  It took us just 6 more years to lose that war at a cost of 56,000 American lives and countless hundreds of thousands maimed.

Oh, never mind.  Great Superbowl coming up!  I’ll take New Orleans with the points.  You?

Since my Grandfather hated the telephone, every caller heard those words and hang-up every time he ”answered”. My Mom and her sister could barely get Grandpa to answer the phone, much less take a message.

One reason Grandpa hated the phone was because he was afraid of it – a lot of people were in the old days. He thought you could be electrocuted through the earpiece.  He thought that if sound traveled through the wires, electricity could too. Of course, this is the man who refused to teach his children to swim because “only kids who know how to swim, drown. Kids who don’t know how to swim, don’t go near the water.” It’s hard to argue against that kind of logic.

I don’t know how much Grandpa influenced me but I almost never answer my own phone. Every caller has to talk through my answer machine.  After decades of doing this, people are now shocked when I answer the phone. I always hear, “This is you? I was expecting your machine.” Some sound quite disappointed.

Is screening calls inconsiderate? Well think of how many people call you to whom you’d actually like to talk . Once I figured my percentage to be about 1 in 9. Those aren’t great odds.  Certainly not good enough for  me to pick up.

Rude? Well give me a call and we’ll talk about it.  Right.

Leonid Stadnik, a Ukrainian, has been verified by Guinness Records as the world’s tallest man.  The former veterinarian stands 8 feet, 5 inches and is seen here shaking hands with the President of the Ukraine.