Funnily, my math teacher always said that if she would play the lottery, she would just play the number 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. as nobody plays them and they have equal chances of being picked. I guess she was wrong.
How can a math teacher make such an obvious mistake? She's right it's picked less often than all other sequences combined, but that's not the same as being picked less often than every other sequence individually.
Best lottery advice I heard from a math teacher was only make bets that have a chance at a retire-early sized prize and preferably no chance of small winnings. The idea being that when he loses, he's donating to charity, which he would have done anyway.
In most of the US lottery proceeds go to schools. Not sure about other areas.
Of course, the fallacy here is that dollars in budgets are fungible, and when lotteries are established municipalities often redirect the same number of dollars away from the schools into whatever pork barrel projects they like.
That way you have your cake (technically the lottery money does fund schools) and can eat it too (in reality it funds other stuff under the table).
> In most of the US lottery proceeds go to schools.
I'm well aware. A government-run school system, however, is NOT a charity. And it's an enormously inefficient way to contribute to a cause -- more than half of the teacher's "donation" is kept by the lottery (distributed as prizes, vendor fees, admin costs)
Nor does much of the money actually impact kids. Most lottery-based education funding in the US is either misleading, or simply replacing (rather than adding to) other funding sources. For example, in New York:
“People think the money is going strictly for education, like for books, or schools, or to pay teacher salaries, but it’s not,” DiPietro told 2 On Your Side.
According to DiPietro, the money on occasion has been “pinched off” by the state, to pay for a variety of items, including attorney’s fees for construction projects and even to pave roads near schools.
“They could say there are school busses that are going to drive on this road so the spending would be ‘education based’ when it’s really not, to me that’s a stretch,” he said.
Oh yeah, the creative reallocation of school money is a problem. But this is the society we live in now; a significant part of the population believes that public schooling is a charity.
Best lottery advice I heard from a math teacher was only make bets that have a chance at a retire-early sized prize and preferably no chance of small winnings. The idea being that when he loses, he's donating to charity, which he would have done anyway.