Posted on 07/07/2010 2:48:46 AM PDT by mattstat
Nobody can scratch better than Las Vegas resident Joan Ginther, who has just scrapped that little gray fuzz off of her fourth winning lottery ticket. Her fourth win!
The two questions on everybody’s mind are: How do I hit Ginther up for a loan? and How do I work her magic? I don’t have a sure answer for the first, other than to say that, she being female, flattery rarely fails; but I can tell you all about the chances of duplicating her performance.
First, her achievements, according to the (as it is sometimes miscalled) Corpus Crispi Caller and Yahoo Buzz:
* 1993: $5.4 million (paid in yearly installments). Odds: 1 in 15.8 million, * 2006: $2 million (lump-sum payoff). Odds: 1 in 1,028,338, * 2008: $3 million (lump-sum payoff). Odds: 1 in 909,000, * 2010: $10 million (lump-sum payoff). Odds: 1 in 1,200,000.
It’s not clear if these are the pre-government confiscation amounts, or the actual dollars she pocketed; probably the former. Still, even considering the (approximate) 40% federal tax bracket, if the lovely Ginther has been living clean, then she likely has at least has several million in the bank.
But since she’s been camped out in Vegas, and she has quite positively evinced a love of gambling, she might not have much left after all. For to win that many lotteries requires her to buy many, many tickets.
Let’s simplify a bit, just to make it easier on ourselves. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at wmbriggs.com ...
There would seem to be something... uh... supernatural about all this...
“Nobody is that lucky!”
Ike Clanton, ‘Tombstone’.
lives in the right city
lives in the right city
Is she employed by a retailer of lottery tickets? Many people are naive enough to trust the store clerk to tell them whether they’ve won anything or not.
It would not be the first case of clerks taking winning tickets.
“Lady Wins Fourth Lottery:...”
It’s just not fair. Tax the “H” out of her.
excuse me? what the “H” for? tax her because she won? her winning are already taxed
careful... you’re progressive is showing
people that are jealous of the success of other people, and want the government to punish them for it, are just pathetic in my book
no founder would have every even considered punishing success.... whether through hard work or pure luck.
it would be flat out unAmerican
people that are jealous of the success of other people, and want the government to punish them for it, are just pathetic in my book
no founder would have ever even considered punishing success.... whether through hard work or pure luck.
it would be flat out unAmerican
So I needed to put a /s, or “sarc.” at the end for those of you that are sarcasm impaired?
WOW! A second idiotic post from a long time veteran of FR. That has to be a record in itself.
It was sarcasm fool. S-A-R-C-A-S-M.
Or she's one of those remote viewers.
“There would seem to be something... uh... supernatural about all this...”
...and that’s how people that don’t understand the relatively simple math of probabilities account for this.
Inflection does not come through very well in times new roman
ping
On the contrary, it’s because the math is so simple and so stark, that there seems to be something supernatural about it. Left to the laws of probability and statistics alone, this would seem to be impossible.
It’s like the old line about the room full of monkeys and typewriters eventually creating the works of Shakespeare; according to the laws of probability and statistics, it’d happen eventually. But, as a matter of fact, it’d never occur.
Supernatural - the caulking between what it is and what you think it ought to be. ;^D
And speaking of supernatural caulking, my girlfriend...
No.
Won’t go there.
Never mind.
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