The odds
I recently heard a joke the ask is there a correlation between playing the lottery and being afraid of being struck by lightning. Probably. I mean, we all do things that put us in harm’s way because we believe that we have the odds on our side. But if you’re willing to contribute money to the government over and over again because you believe that you were lucky I have to wonder did you skip a year in math class? Do you understand what those numbers marked as odds indicate? No I do not put money on the lottery. A long time ago I read a book about the odds in various forms of gambling and it was clear from the first chapter on that the player never wins. Here, do a simple math question. I am not going to feed you the data points but try to figure out how many individual lottery tickets you would have to buy to tip the odds in your favour. If you answered 1 ticket you are just as correct as someone who wrote 150 million tickets. You cannot game the system the system is there to game you. The only reason governments put so much time and effort into setting up these voluntary taxation schemes is because they win. There it is. People fail to understand the simple things. Like when I see someone posting on Facebook that by placing this disclaimer Facebook cannot use your data. I’m not sure that’s how it works. For the record, if I place a photo on social media I do it with full recognition that it is out there as the saying goes do with it what you will which is why my photos seemed to be limited to showing the current snow cover on the line. By the time you see the photo things will already have changed.
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