- What if someone from the future came back and told the world what the winning numbers were, from the $1.5B Powerball draw? Everyone would rush to buy their ticket with those numbers, right? Roughly some 250M tickets were bought for tonight's jackpot, but if you split the $1.5B between that number of tickets, you end up with just $6 -- a net of $4 for each $2 Powerball ticket bought. You know that this person from the future is lying about those numbers, right?
- I did it. I bought $20 worth of tickets. First time, ever, that I bought tickets, other than adding $5 here and there to a workplace pool. If I won the Powerball, I would set up a design office, equipped with a bunch of expensive prototyping CNC and 3D printing tools, hire a bunch of software and hardware engineers and designers, and just work all day exploring ideas. It'd be my version of Walt Disney's Imagineers. Is that weird, that other people play to retire rich, but I play to literally build my dream workplace and job?
- It's not a waste of money. By buying lottery tickets, you're contributing to someone's dreams being fulfilled. In my opinion, what is a waste of money, is spending your winnings on superficial things like expensive cars, dream vacations, mansions, etc.
- Aside from obviously setting up trusts for family members and some close friends, I would set aside roughly half the remaining money to funding different nonprofits, specifically, I would set up a $10M chair at my alma mater, and a $10M technology trust for my high school, and some other donations to arts and music charities. None of this matters of course, because the odds of winning are somewhere around 1 in 300M. Still, for $1.5B, there's a lot of good one can do, and just thinking about the good things you could do for others, makes you feel a little bit excited and happier about the idea of winning.
- The cutoff time for buying a ticket to the current draw, is one hour before that draw. In line at the grocery store, 20 minutes before the deadline, people in line were panicking. A store employee started telling people about how the bar across the street has a machine and that there's no line, so some folks behind me up and left. I stood there reading my RSS feed in Feedly. As the time ticked down to 8 minutes before the deadline, the woman in front of me remarked that we won't make it in time, I assured her that, even if you don't, all that money rolls over into the next jackpot, so you're still going to be really rich if you're lucky enough. With one minute to go, I made my purchase. That's lucky enough, don't you think?
Well, I didn't win, so it's back to the computer and designing stuff...aka what I was planning to do, if I had won. :D
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