Lottery is a kind of another gambling?

[Aleaf]

Recently, a crime was committed.10 millions of RMB were missing from Agricultural Bank of china. The investigation indicated that several stuff working with the bank had dipped into the public funds without authorization.They used the money they stole bought lotteries.
In china as far as i know many ppl buy lottery and some of them went bankrapcy because of it despte that they are just the minority. Most of ppl won't stop buyng lotteries once they start in the hope of one day winning one.The rate of winning is low almost everyone is losing money. in this sense buying lottery is similar to playing gambling. Gambling is illegal in china. But the government issues lottery.
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[Prezbucky]

Yes, it is a gamble... one with way worse odds than playing the stock market.

Most people who use the lottery to try to make money (at least here in the States) probably end up simply wasting their money.

And then they whine that they don't have enough.
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[Jamie (K)]

Lotteries are not just similar to gambling, there ARE a type of gambling.

Government lotteries are also a form of regressive taxation. That means a tax where the poor pay much more than the rich. Rich people usually don't gamble.

In my state, all of the profits from the lottery go to the schools. So, even though there is statistically a better chance of being struck by lightning TWICE than there is of winning the lotto, once every couple of months I buy a ticket just for fun. I consider it a gift to the state's schools, and if by some miniscule chance I happen to win, fun fun fun!

By the way, there are mathematical methods to bring a person's chances of winning at blackjack to more than 50/50. People who know how to do this are called "card counters", and they can make huge amounts of money. However, the casinos soon find out who they are, and after that, they won't let them in the door. In Massachusetts there used to be (and maybe still is) a Catholic priest who was a professor of mathematics and taught many students to card count. They would win enormous amounts of money and then donate it all to charity.

[Prezbucky]

Didn't some guy at MIT come up with a (more or less) fool-proof formula for winning at blackjack?

Or was that poker?
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[Aleaf]

Some of the time i doubt the lottery is manuplated behind the curtain. many numbers were so strange! eg 69995, 9992, 00026, 99934, 44545,73377,44777, 37377......etc
Besides, how could we know wheter the money buying the lotteries has been used on charities or public welfare ? Maybe the income from the lottery has been use to pay for the salary of those who organise the lottery.
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[Jamie (K)]

In US states it's very easy to find out what the lottery money went to, because the financial records are very transparent and available to the public, and the whole lottery is overseen by an independent auditing firm. If there is something wrong (which in my state there hasn't been yet), the state police and the other authorities will arrest people. We can easily find out who gets the prize money, because the names of the winners are published information. The numbers are chosen by a machine designed at an engineering university, and they are chosen on TV, so everyone can see how the drawing works and that it is clean.

One principle that's always true of lotteries is that the less money people are able to risk, the more they really do risk. You can see this in the line to buy lotto tickets. In the skyscraper where I used to work, if it was all professional men in business suits waiting at the lotto machine, the line moved very fast, because these men buy only one ticket, and they let the computer choose the numbers. If you wait behind a line of poor people, you will be in line forever, because most of those people buy 25 to 100 tickets, and they're supersticious about the numbers, so they have a long list that they read off based on whatever their "system" is, and the clerk has to take a lot of time to punch them into the computer. It's not unusual for poor people to spend a third of their salaries on lotto tickets every week, while people with more money and education buy maybe one every two or three months. Part of the problem is a lack of financial education, because I've met lower-middle-class people who think you already have to be rich before you start investing, whereas in the US you can start your own investment account with as little as $50.

Just to show you how superstitious people can be, here's a little (true!) story: In my city, most of the lottery machines are in gasoline stations and small grocery stores that are owned by Chaldeans, who are Christians from Iraq. Chaldean women tend to have big, beautiful eyes. One of my Chaldean friends worked in her brother-in-law's grocery store for a while, in a poorer neighborhood, and almost her entire job was standing at the lotto machine and selling tickets to people, because people in that neighborhood bought a LOT of lottery tickets. One day a man came in, gave her the numbers he wanted, and the started yelling, "DON'T YOU LOOK AT MY NUMBERS WITH THOSE BIG EYES YOU GOT! YOU GONNA JINX MY NUMBERS!" She thought he was joking at first, but he was serious. She told him she had to look at the numbers in order to key them into the machine. He told her it was okay to look at the numbers when she keyed them in, but she was forbidden to look at the ticket. This arrangement worked for a couple of weeks, but soon he was so convinced that her big eyes were jinxing his tickets that whenever this man came in, her brother-in-law had to sell him the ticket instead of her.

[Che Gevara]

Sometimes I go to Casino,but not very often
I don't like lottery,I don't trust them...
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