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Sir,
The oldest get-rich-quick scheme has to be gambling. Humanity has been gambling since the Palaeolithic period. We learned how to gamble before we could write. If you should ever be tasked to draw parallels between modern humans and their cavemen counterparts, don’t neglect to mention gambling. We gamble as much as we did back then… maybe more. We love a good bet. It’s our favourite pastime. The global gambling industry is estimated to be as large as US$400 billion (with a ‘B’) – that is more than six times the size of the movie industry.
Gambling is a massive industry and government involvement was inevitable to regulate the sector in order to eliminate the illegal component and protect the interests of a variety of innocent stakeholders. I offer a different way to protect innocent stakeholders from gambling, and that is, don’t do it.
The probability of winning the lotto is 1 in 20 million. Let’s see if I actually learned anything at school. If you were to buy one scratch ticket a day, it would take you 55 000 years to win ONCE! In that time you would have spent E100 million to win a jackpot of E7 million. Maybe you have E100 million lying around, I don’t know you; you could be an established individual but I’m not sure if you can Pusha-Phanda-Play for 55 000 years. The rich people who know these odds often say the lottery is a tax on the poor because low income households are notorious for spending a disproportionate amount of income on the lottery, never to win it. Even in 100 lifetimes you wouldn’t win it.
Famously, ‘the house always wins’. The odds are stacked against you my friend. The longer you play, the greater the odds are that the result of your play will match up with the house’s edge. In the short-term, a player may well be ahead; over the long haul, the house’s edge will eventually grind the player down into unprofitability.
I think slot machines capture the whole gambling industry perfectly. Slot machines play winning sounds and show flashing graphics while taking your money.
Anonymous