Age of the Geek

A lotto philosophy
     So I was planning on finishing my list of anticipated movies for this year, but this Powerball thing has given me a better topic. Something I’ve been meaning to touch on for a while now.
     As of this writing, the Powerball jackpot is approaching a record $1.3 billion. That’s almost as much money as the worldwide domestic gross of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Almost.
     The huge jackpot prize is resulting in a massive surge in lotto sales, which means odds are good that by the time you read this column, somebody will be $1.3 billion richer.
     Well, not quite. If the winner picks the graduated payment option, they’ll be $13 million richer, receiving a total of $910,000,000 in gradually increasing payments over the next 30 years. This is the way I would go. $13 million would be a good start for establishing good financial practices. By the time I received my final payment of $56 million, I’d hope to be more than capable of properly managing that amount of money.
     More likely though, assuming this hypothetical winner behaves like most big jackpot winners, they will opt for the lump sum option. This will give them $556,920,000 in one big payment and an incredible temptation to burn through it all faster than one would think possible.
     In either case, all it takes is a $2 ticket and a lot of luck. But before we go there, let’s look back a few months to Mark Zuckerberg.
     If you spent any time on Facebook when Mark Zuckerberg announced that he would be giving away 99 percent of his Facebook shares to charity, you probably saw at least one person posting about how Zuckerberg will give $4.5 million to a handful of lucky Facebook users, and all they have to do is copy and paste a message in their status.
     If you saw somebody doing this, you probably rolled your eyes at their gullibility.
     If you did this yourself, you probably included the caveat that “it doesn’t hurt to try.”
     That’s not entirely true though. After all, one can’t spread such obvious nonsense in full view of their friends and family without doing a little bit of harm to their reputation.
     There is a roughly zero percent chance that Mark Zuckerberg is going to give millions of dollars to a random person on Facebook because they shared an image. Spreading these things takes almost no effort, but they also make people look foolish with no chance for positive gain.
     People who spread obviously false things get looked down on, if not publicly than definitely privately. When you see somebody sharing in image about Mark Zuckerberg giving away free dinosaurs or unicorns, that is a joke at the expense of people who thought there was even the slightest chance at being gifted money for posting on social media.
     So here’s the big philosophical question of the week.
     Is it hypocritical to mock people who post obviously false things on Facebook in the hopes of winning money when you have a $2 Powerball ticket in your pocket?
     The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1-in-292,201,338. That’s technically greater than zero, but not by much.
     At the same time, theoretically speaking, there’s nothing stopping Mark Zuckerberg from randomly picking out a person on Facebook and gifting them a million dollars. If I were in his position, and I caught wind of the rumor, I’d be tempted to play along with it just to watch the reaction.
     The odds of being randomly gifted a million dollars from Mark Zuckerberg may make the lotto look like a sure thing by comparison, but it is still technically within the realm of possibility.
     Then there’s the cost to consider. Lotto tickets cost $2 to play. At minimum wage, a single Powerball ticket represents about 20 minutes worth of work. That’s a far greater investment than two clicks of a button one would probably make while they are at work.
     So one might say that sharing the Facebook image is actually the more rational option. After all, the odds of success in either case are close enough to zero that the risk/reward ratio makes the Powerball ticket the more foolish investment.
     Of course Powerball tickets aren’t all-or-nothing endeavors for the jackpot. There’s about a 1-in-25 chance that you’ll come out ahead, even if it’s just $2.
     Granted, even 1-in-25 are pretty abysmal odds, but it’s a lot more likely than gaining fortune from an Internet billionaire.
     At the end of the day, it’s really all about the entertainment. The first rule in gambling is never expect to win.
     For a $2 Powerball ticket, I can walk around with a piece of paper in my wallet that gives me reason to imagine the kind of life I’d lead if I won big. Considering how much of the Powerball pot goes into taxes anyway, odds are good that I’ll see a benefit from that purchase one way or the other.
     I still don’t see the point in spreading nonsense on Facebook, though.
 
     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and would be a kind and benevolent member of the 1 percent.