this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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Unpopular Opinion

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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.)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

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.