May 5, 1999

It's a chancy job, but somebody's got to do it

I've known for a long time how foolish it is to buy a California lottery ticket. Buying two is twice as foolish, and buying 10 is more than ten times as foolish, because you know for a fact you've got nine losers when you buy 10 tickets. I still buy one every so often, against my better judgment. On the average, we're all average. And the average lottery ticket buyer "wins" back $50 for every $100 he dumps into the lottery. No need to rationalize about contributing to our public schools. If you just donate $100 to Laguna Salada instead of buying $100 worth of lottery tickets, you have contributed about three times as much with the same money. You have avoided wasting the roughly $16 used to run the lottery, and you have chosen to contribute to your own low-wealth school district instead of contributing to high wealth districts all over the state.

The lottery folk are happy to tell you the odds are only one out of 18,000,000 you will win the big prize. The worst thing about the California Lottery: if they do draw your winning ticket, they act like you've accomplished some work that's added to the total wealth of the state, rather than just participated in a redistribution, where you are richer but millions of other people are a little poorer. Taxing your new wealth is immoral and should be illegal.

I decided the other day I would prepare a book with all the possible lottery numbers printed out. I prepared a sheet in small type, smaller than the size of type you are reading now. I came up with 670 groups of six numbers, like 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, or 10, 20, 30, 40, 45, 50, or 11, 21, 25, 26, 37, 49.

Then I was going to sit down at the computer and type up the 18,000,000 variations that are possible. But first I decided to check out how much paper I would need. It turned out to be about 54 reams, each ream 500 sheets. The total would be 26,866 sheets of 8.5 x 11 inch paper. I can buy that paper for about 20 dollars a case, or about 108 dollars for the paper I would need.

I estimate the ink used would cost about three cents a sheet, or something more than $800 for the entire job.

If I could type the equivalent of 600 characters and spaces (about 100 words) a minute, I estimate it would take me about 20 minutes per page, about 9000 hours, or about 4.5 years at 40 hours per week, not counting bathroom and coffee breaks. If my time typing is worth $10 an hour, labor would be $90,000. Add the cost of computers, printers, etc. and you are talking roughly $100,000. Of course with those kinds of costs, it would pay to invest in a computer software program that would do the typing automatically.

Only then would it be time to pick out my selection of six numbers. With my luck I'd get the right numbers but the wrong week.

If you enjoy gambling, The Reactor suggests you play poker or flip coins with some friends. Those odds are better than Las Vegas. As for the California Lottery, throwing your money into the ocean would be bad for the environment, but otherwise not much worse than buying lottery chances. Some recent Reactor columns may be found at Paul Azevedo's website, http://www.thereactor.net/ Reach him by e-mail at Paul@thereactor.net