'Lucky' woman who won lottery four times

Maybe if we raised taxes, we wouldn't need lotteries to pay for our children's education.

 

I'm vehemently against state sponsored lotteries. It's the most regressive tax we have.

 

I blame Howard Jarvis.

 

But it's one of the very few taxes that are completely optional.

I'm not surprised there might be a backdoor to these things. Probably her MO was similar to the Canadian fellow; find a "business-friendly" store that'll let you return them. That explains the concentration of winners in that particular store.

 

Why?
In her case it's practically free money.

 

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2011/08/michigan_couple_massachusetts_lottery_cash_winfall_scheme.html

A Michigan couple who incorporated a company just to take advantage of flaws in lottery systems.

Good for them

 

They're not regressive. They're a tax on people who can't do math. If you slept through school and now think your only path to success is hanging out in convenience stores and scratching pieces of cardboard, then you deserve to pay whatever you voluntarily pay.

And I'm all for voluntary taxes. Coercive taxes are the ones I'm vehemently against, because they allow Peter to rob Paul for his own behalf. In a lottery, Peter is willingly giving away his money so neither Paul nor Perry have to.

 

True, but I don't think government should be encouraging this kind of behavior.

Lotteries have massive marketing budgets.

The State also maintains a monopoly on it.

 

Kudos to this lady for figuring it out. More power to her. She's not stealing lottery tickets or working with someone on the inside of the lottery department.

I have to same feeling about card-counting in blackjack. If you've got a good enough memory to do it, the casinos shouldn't view it as cheating. It's not. But God forbid someone actually turn out to be smarter than they are.

 

Completely agree. She's not stealing, she beat the system. If the people who do the lottery are stupid enough to have a pattern, then good for her for figuring it out and beating it.

It should also be noted that to figure out the pattern, she was buying a shitload of tickets...

 

Even if you figure it out, the only way it works is if you buy a bunch and are allowed to return ones you don't scratch -- or the store lets you paw through the tickets and select which ones you want.

 

I'm thinking of the scene in "Real Genius" in which the long-time weirdo submits several thousand entries into some sweepstakes. He says something on the order of, "By my estimation, I'll win 46.8% of the prizes, and almost certainly the jackpot." Someone asks him if that's ethical. "They made the rules," he says.