1 yr. ago • 88%

Powerball jackpot increases to $1.55 billion after no one wins

www.nbcnews.com Powerball jackpot increases to $1.55 billion after no one wins

The last time someone won the Powerball jackpot after the July 19 drawing for the $1.08 billion pot.

Powerball's massive jackpot will rollover and increase after Saturday's drawing produced no winning tickets, according to the game's website.

The $1.4-billion jackpot now grows to $1.55 billion but remains the third-largest in Powerball's history (the second largest was $1.586 billion in 2016).

The last time someone won the Powerball jackpot after the July 19 drawing for the $1.08 billion pot. The winning ticket then was sold in California.

38 comments

Imagine if everyone just decided they were tired of this lottery bullshit and collectively refused to play...

32
- Personally I'd be far more interested in the lottery if we lived in a post scarcity society, where people's needs are guaranteed to be met instead of the poorest people desperately trying to get out of poverty
  
  33
  
  I used to think of the lottery as a tax on idiots but I’ve since come to realize it’s a tax on the desperate.
  
  21
- General Strikes are impossible.
  
  -1
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I find the lottery fun in moderation, but I only spend like $50 on lottery tickets a year so I’m not exactly the target audience anyway.

31
- The lottery is by and far an excessive tax on the poor. That's my only problem with it.
  
  22
  
  Generally the big culprit there is the scratch-off stuff you see at gas stations.
  
  Powerball, due to the delays in reward processing, is not as "addictive" as scratch-off/peel-off gambling.
  
  17
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  13
  
  Few people bat an eye at spending $40 for two tickets and food to a movie for two hours. If $20 gets someone a few hours of escapism and dreaming, it's not that big of a deal. But like any other entertainment, spending that much every day is probably not good, and certainly not if it's done only as an investment.
  
  21
Didn't they add another number to the Powerball which massively decreased the probability of winning?

23
Just split it among all of us already. I could use a half cup of coffee.

7
Wow. A crazy jackpot.

3
- Not really, they added an extra number to the lottery so that people would be even less likely to win, which leads to larger jackpot numbers. It's a marketing ploy meant to trick more people into paying the stupid tax.
  
  8
Doesn't a lot of the money go to scholarship funds?

2
- Depends on the state. My state puts 40% of the funds into protecting the environment and the rest goes into the state's general fund.
  
  1
Jackpots are just another poor people tax.

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-16
- "chance to be a billionaire" "Who cares"
  
  Is there something I'm missing
  
  7
  
  Yeah the "chance" part.
  
  10
  
  Expected return calculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_return there are likely better "bets" you can make. On top of that, even if the expected return is good, you have to take into account the Kelly Criterion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion which limits how much of your bankroll you want to spend on a longshot, and if that's less than the cost of a single ticket, buying tickets is more likely to bankrupt you than for you to win.
  
  https://quantwolf.com/doc/powerball/powerball.html
  
  2
  
  After taxes you'd still come out less than a billionaire. But if a measley rich as fuck is good enough... He'll I'll probably kick a couple of bucks into the pot for the next drawing.
  
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  -6
- Me.
  
  2
  
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  -3
- Everyone that skipped the half lesson on probability given in public high school.
  
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