Comments on: LOL-January 4

By: Igelino

Igelino — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 21:50:06 +0000

@Pepperjack #24 - don’t train it to go on the dashboard! The windshield is better because then you just turn on the wipers to clean it up.

All little birds are trained to go on the windshield.

By: FeelinOld

FeelinOld — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:23:53 +0000

People do win, I can’t be bothered buying the tickets, but my personal opinion is that there should be a top end cap on the prizes, and if they get beyond that there are multiple draws, instead of one 50Million prize, make it 50 prizes of 1 million, to most people playing I think 1 million would be a life changing amount, if it isn’t why are you playing the lottery?
I personally know 4 people who have won ‘life changing’ amounts in the lottery of course life changing can mean different things, one was a cousin who was about to drop out of university because she was having difficulty making ends meet, she grabbed a scratch ticket in a what the hey moment and won 10K which was enough to help her through her last year and a half (this was a while ago when 10K to a ’starving student’ was huge)
The second recently won 250K, they used a bit to do a family trip and the rest is set aside for their daughters education.
So in those two cases the lottery money really did go towards education…
The third played religiously, won just under 500K and is now retired amd enjoying a quiet life (they had been scrimping and saving to retire early anyways).
The fourth, won 800K and managed to blow it all within two years and is back working full time paycheque to paycheque and is bitter as heck (nobodies fault but their own).

By: PepperjackCandy

PepperjackCandy — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:29:39 +0000

(If I had hundreds of dollars a week I could gamble, I’d feel I’d ALREADY won the lottery.)

This.

Also, The Bad Seed (#23), how did you train your bird to go on the dashboard?

By: The Bad Seed

The Bad Seed — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 06:48:02 +0000

1. As the owner of a small parrot (with slightly-clipped/trimmed wings) who loves to run/fly free when I’m home, I’m on a constant search for droppings, so I got the car trip cartoon right away! However, if we’re riding in the car he’s trained to go on the dashboard and not on me OR the windshield!

2. Wow, someone actually buys a lottery ticket to selflessly support the noble beneficiaries of the lottery? Really??? Personally, I figure a buck is a small price to pay for 5 minutes or so (sometimes more, depending on the potential prize) of excitement and daydreaming a lottery ticket brings to me. I buy less than one lottery ticket per year on average, and it cheers me up more than a greeting card generally does (which generally cost more than a buck), so what the heck. And I figure that, since the odds are so small anyway, my odds are the same as someone who buys a thousand tickets for the same drawing. But the people who spend hundreds or thousands of dollars per year on lotteries, thinking it’s really their way out, make me sad.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 02:31:20 +0000

In California, middle class college students don’t qualify for much financial aid, and man do they complain about it. Most of it goes to working class students, who would probably trade places with those middle class kids in an instant.

By: George P

George P — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 01:22:32 +0000

The problem is that the lottery isn’t funded by people spending five bucks a week. They make their money from people spending $50-$100 a week on tickets, and those are the people least able to afford it. It’s not that they can afford to waste the money; it’s that they need to do something to get out of the hole they are in, and they’ve been told by a trusted source, their state governments, that this is a good way to do it.

I think gambling should be legal, but I don’t the the government should be involved in selling false hope.

In Georgia the lottery is the mechanism by which the poor fund the college education of the middle class, which is very close to this cartoon.

By: aoeu

aoeu — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:40:28 +0000

I disagree about the lottery. I’m well acquainted with statistics and I see the draw - you won’t miss $5/week if you buy a ticket. Except you’re not even spending that; around here lotteries pay out 60+%. So, by the statistics you’re spending $2/week on a lottery ticket. You definitely won’t miss that. Basically, you’re spending a small amount of money for some hope - matching 4/6 numbers is worth several tens of thousands of dollars and would make your year. I think it’s a reasonable investment if it doesn’t hurt your finances.

By: Jeff S.

Jeff S. — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:39:59 +0000

I remember a 1980s movie starring Rob Lowe called “Oxford Blues.” Lowe plays a valet in Las Vegas. One day a rich lady client offers him money in exchange for sex. The lottery discussion always reminds me of their conversation –
She: “What would you do with $100?”
He: “Blow it!”
She: “And with $1000?”
He: “Spend it!”
She: “And $5000?”
He: “Invest it!” He then plays it all on the roulette, wins, and goes to Oxford.

From what I’ve seen, unless you hit some sort of mega jackpot, most people just spend their winnings on more tickets. I mean, I’ll throw some money in on the Powerball once the jackpot gets pretty high, but I also don’t go crazy with it either.

By: paperboy

paperboy — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:18:40 +0000

Yeah, turquoise cow#17, the people who spend hundreds of dollars weekly on tickets every week are silly (at best), but, really, they’d probably squander it some other way if the lottery wasn’t available. (If I had hundreds of dollars a week I could gamble, I’d feel I’d ALREADY won the lottery.)

By: turquoise cow

turquoise cow — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 20:26:40 +0000

I used to sell lottery tickets, and I knew many people who would literally spend hundreds of dollars on tickets every week (some every day). I sold lotto tickets at two different establishments for a grand total of about six years. In all that time I never knew anyone who won the “big one.” We had a couple of customers win a few thousand dollars, but I never knew anyone who one something like a million or anything close to enough money to retire on. Most people won a couple bucks or a couple hundred bucks, and most of those people just threw their winnings into more tickets.

I’m not a math person, but I figured that the odds were pretty slim in favor of my every winning a great amount if none of my customers ever won very much. Near the end, I was so sick of the job and so against the entire establishment that whenever regulars would come in with a list of numbers for me to punch I felt like saying “Why? You’re not going to win.” And most of them would get very upset if you didn’t tend to them immediately.