I went to bed too early tonight, I think. I woke up again just at the end of Letterman, and now that silly Craig Ferguson is babbling away in the background. Actually, his stuff is a lot fresher and funnier than most of his competitors these days.
But I digress - sorry about that. I started off thinking about lotteries, and I'll continue with that for a moment. Here in Canada, we've got a couple of national lotteries that are sold locally by our several provincial lottery corporations, each of whom gets its own cut, I'm sure. The twice-a-week Lotto 649 was the first to double its prices a couple of years ago. That left only one with halfway reasonable ticket costs - the huge-odds Super 7, in which you had to get lucky on all seven numbers to make any real money. So you know right away how many of us got rich with odds of something like 68-million to one.
As if that wasn't bad enough, and apparently it wasn't, they've now changed its name and doubled its prices too. This is their response to the public's obvious resistance to being so flagrantly ripped off by bullshit gambling schemes. Originally, and I do go back to Day One of our lotteries, these were flogged on the basis that they'd provide a painless source of funds for charities and health care. The only 'charity' involved here is yours in donating your hard-earned cash to some flim-flam scheme, and the only 'health care' involves the health of the government's General Revenue Fund, into which profits are being funneled. Trust me - would I lie to you?
To stand a reasonable chance of winning 'The Big One' on any of these multi-million-dollar lotteries, you'd have to buy tickets for every draw, and live to be 640,000 years old. And by then, God Knows, you're going to be much too old and tired to enjoy that tour of the world's best tropical resorts that you've been day-dreaming about on your way to the lotto ticket booth. Want to double your money safely? Fold it and put it in your pocket!
No comments:
Post a Comment