Objectivism and winning the state, or national, lottery

[Peter]

The next Powerball drawing is just 9 hours away just before 2 pm on Monday, December 6, 2021. Suggestions. First off, the tickets are two bucks each so gamble wisely. Next, don’t have a conniption fit if you win. Put the winnings in a bank to draw some measly interest for a while. Then hire a financial planner.

Powerball. Next Drawing – Mon, Dec 6. Estimated Jackpot $280 Million Cash Value: $205 Million.

Generally, with the cash value after taxes, you only get to take 55 percent of that as your winnings. So, $205,000,000 times 55 percent equals $112,750,000. Who wants to be a millionaire?

[Peter]

The next Powerball drawing is on Saturday, Dec. 11. The cash value is $224,700,000. After state and federal taxes are paid you will take home fifty - five percent of that. $224,700,000 times .55 equals $123,585,000.

If it’s truly needed right away, pay off debts. And as always, the best minds recommend amateur investors put that money into one or more bank accounts that pay “some interest.” You might be getting a low interest rate at those several banks (for safety), but stop and smell the roses, and think of the “Benjamins” because paper bills doesn’t smell that good. Hire a financial planner. Bill Gates has invested in AutoNation (AN), Deere and Company, Caterpillar, Waste Management, Eco Labs, UPS, and FedX, etc. 

[Peter]

The next Powerball drawing is on Saturday, October 29, 2022. Estimated jackpot: $800,000,000 if you want to draw it out over the years and of course taxes will be taken out.

The Right Now Cash value: 387.7 million, times .55 equals $213, 235, 000 take home after taxes.

Tickets are two bucks a piece. I will buy 5 tickets for ten bucks.

[Marc]

4 hours ago, Peter said:

The next Powerball drawing is on Saturday, October 29, 2022. Estimated jackpot: $800,000,000 if you want to draw it out over the years and of course taxes will be taken out.

The Right Now Cash value: 387.7 million, times .55 equals $213, 235, 000 take home after taxes.

Tickets are two bucks a piece. I will buy 5 tickets for ten bucks.

Would you take the cash up front or the annual amount if you won? 

How many years is it over if you draw it out?

[Peter]

5 hours ago, Marc said:

Would you take the cash up front or the annual amount if you won? 

How many years is it over if you draw it out?

Feel free to crunch the numbers. I looked it up, and the amount “spread out” is payments to the winner or winners over 29 years. Of course, I would not do that. One payout with a big amount is what I would do. And then I would keep a million on hand mostly in a savings account that gives some interest though it isn’t much. I would hire an investment person, then I would invest the rest, some in federal or state bonds or other munis, some in other investment funds, and a small portion in the U.S. stock market. I have noticed some items or bonds from say, Puerto Rico or Costa Rica pay more but they are considered riskier. In total even if you were only getting 2 or 3 percent interest . . . times the cash payout of 387.7 million minus 55 percent taxes, the final amount from Saturday’s Powerball drawing is approximately $213, 235, 000.

And I would, as much as possible, not tell a soul. Is that doable if you hand out some cash gifts to family? I would worry about attempted thefts and ransom threats to everyone. So being a big winner can be a double-edged sword. And, not just to those winning morons who start buying very expensive items, go to Vegas etc. Dumb. I believe those stories about “how the lottery ruined my life, so I would go into these ventures with some sensible actions.

[Marc]

20 hours ago, Peter said:

Feel free to crunch the numbers. I looked it up, and the amount “spread out” is payments to the winner or winners over 29 years. Of course, I would not do that. One payout with a big amount is what I would do. And then I would keep a million on hand mostly in a savings account that gives some interest though it isn’t much. I would hire an investment person, then I would invest the rest, some in federal or state bonds or other munis, some in other investment funds, and a small portion in the U.S. stock market. I have noticed some items or bonds from say, Puerto Rico or Costa Rica pay more but they are considered riskier. In total even if you were only getting 2 or 3 percent interest . . . times the cash payout of 387.7 million minus 55 percent taxes, the final amount from Saturday’s Powerball drawing is approximately $213, 235, 000.

And I would, as much as possible, not tell a soul. Is that doable if you hand out some cash gifts to family? I would worry about attempted thefts and ransom threats to everyone. So being a big winner can be a double-edged sword. And, not just to those winning morons who start buying very expensive items, go to Vegas etc. Dumb. I believe those stories about “how the lottery ruined my life, so I would go into these ventures with some sensible actions.

Yeah me too, lump sum and invest but if you do win then try to diversify a bit more than simply US and a few central Anerican countries.

Invest in different asset classes than just bonds that are in the midst of a devastating spiral down in London, Tokyo and NY.

Bitcoin, farm land, hard assets like silver gold copper etc too.

I will only charge you 2% and of course a percentage of your profits too.

 

[Peter]

On 1/11/2016 at 8:41 PM, KorbenDallas said:

With the Powerball jackpot at $1.4 billion at the time of this post, what does Objectivism have to say about winning a state, or the national, lottery?

As Ayn Rand infamously said, For two bucks, I would buy a lottery ticket worth billions if I won. joke

Someone in California, I think, just won the Powerball tonight. Take home 280 m. The Mega Millions lottery’s take home 369.6 (one lump sum after taxes times 55 percent) is just over $200,000,000. The next drawing for that is Friday July 21^st. So, I will play the Mega Millions. I usually get two tickets per drawing.  

In other news, a “fan of Rand,” Fox’s Trace Gallagher has moved to weeknights at 11 pm from his 12 o’clock slot. If I have seen the news at six to seven, I don‘t care to see it again at 11 pm so this is a good alternative.

From Wikipedia:  Gallagher grew up in the ski resort town of Mammoth Lakes, California, where he was the quarterback for the Mammoth Huskies high school football team. He graduated from high school in 1979. Gallagher studied at the University of San Diego and he majored in business playing quarterback for the Torero football team.

[Peter]

The Powerball cash payout is $320,500,000. After taxes? You only get, on average minus federal taxes, state taxes, etc., 55 percent. Soooo . . .

320.5 x .55 = $176,275,000. Round it off to $176 million.

I think it is getting high enough that I may buy two tickets for the Wednesday, September 20^th drawing which I think is around 11pm. Four bucks is worth the fun.

[Marc]

6 hours ago, Peter said:

The Powerball cash payout is $320,500,000. After taxes? You only get, on average minus federal taxes, state taxes, etc., 55 percent. Soooo . . .

320.5 x .55 = $176,275,000. Round it off to $176 million.

I think it is getting high enough that I may buy two tickets for the Wednesday, September 20^th drawing which I think is around 11pm. Four bucks is worth the fun.

Buy four tickets for eight bucks and we will split it I will buy $8 of tickets for our draw here on Friday which is for "only" ten's of millions and we will split it too.

Less money here but obviously better odds.

What say you?

[Strictlylogical]

If the American people would just vote to get rid of the FED, and tied the currency to something real, maybe you would have a choice of saving your money instead of being forced to gamble it on others enterprises, just to keep the money's value and purchasing power.

Given the current situation  though, betting on the best and most sound horses out there would be a good idea... as long as you can get reliable information and clarity.  But the system is designed so that you are forced to invest or transfer wealth to others... soon property will be myth, and you will be "rewarded" based on your credit score.

[tmj]

In zee furture vee vill give you all zee cola you may wish, ( if of course you are 'able' to recieve), but vee have now a situation vere vee have Coke and Pepsi , soon leibshen vee vill finally have A cola maker , have patience und soon vee vill macht  du happy.

[Strictlylogical]

54 minutes ago, tmj said:

In zee furture vee vill give you all zee cola you may wish, ( if of course you are 'able' to recieve), but vee have now a situation vere vee have Coke and Pepsi , soon leibshen vee vill finally have A cola maker , have patience und soon vee vill macht  du happy.

If everybody owned property, had ze caars, ate steak, und lived in ze house inshtead of ein hoomble living pod, ze planet would kaput in next years..

somebody has to eat ze boogz, own nossing, an live in pods…

ze solution is that YOU do so, zat way togezzer WE are zaving ze planet.

[Marc]

While teaching zis in zee zchoolz 

[tmj]

Sound or 'real' currency is a great tool  for human flourishing and the protection of liberty , but I fear something in the seed of the institutional acceptance or formalization of the theory and practice of 'corporation' sowed the potential for a lot of the things described in the communist frame of economics.

I do not think it is a wholly avoidable outcome , and if history played over and over , the idea  that such activities would be 'created' or 'replicated'  in a lot if not all instances is because of all the advantages that such legal and economic structures confer , but there is something .. it feels like it is coming up big time to bite us in the collective ass. Some trade off in the long game 'we' missed.

I'll be Moldbugian and theorize that an ownership structure that recognized only a single entity as owner or at worst a limit to the diffusion of responsibility for ownership could be a hedge against what feels like an almost gravitational force to bending at scale human projects toward hegemony.

As Rand observed , only cooperation between the wielders of governmental powers and those owners of surplus capital can create monopolies. 

Galt's Gulch perhaps would be populated by Kings of companies as opposed to legal entities.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

T,

Corporations should be for free individuals, not slaveholders.

But in a mixed economy, all you get are mixed crony corporations.

The concepts surrounding corporations are so muddled, everybody uses the same words, but mean something else.

This is the way slaveholders love it, too. They get to preach good things like freedom as they do bad things like enslave others.

We need philosophy to remedy this, of course, but philosophy is not enough. We have to get rid of the government monopoly system over the money supply. Despite the way Rand said it, the government doesn't have a monopoly on force, or even initiating force (just look at the Second Amendment), so why in hell should it have a monopoly on issuing money? And don't forget, having a monopoly over licensing those who can issue money is the same thing at root.

The early libertarians and Randians had the correct idea when they kept saying over and over: "separation of the state and the economy." (It's odd that they don't preach it that much anymore.)

The only thing I have see that does this separation out here in reality is not an idealized banker like Midas Mulligan. Looking for Midas Mulligan to exist outside of fiction is like looking for a monkey that doesn't like bananas to be the gatekeeper to the banana patch.

Here is the the axiomatic concept of banking. All bankers love free bananas. A is A.  

 

The only thing for real that separates the government from controlling the money supply is Bitcoin. This is not because Bitcoin uses the Internet or because this economist or that politician said so. It is because the invention of Bitcoin separated force from money. There are no guns enforcing the existence of Bitcoin and it cannot be confiscate by guns. (The only way I have seen for Bitcoin to be confiscated up to now is by torturing or tricking the owner to get the hashes. And that is not sustainable, to use a modern buzz-phrase meant for something else.)

You cannot separate the state from the economy until you remove force from money and leave each individual's money solely under his or her control. Bitcoin does that. Granted, you need the Internet for Bitcoin to exist (not really, at root you need electricity), but you also needed the printing press for separation of church and state.

It's going to take a while for the old fiat money system to collapse and the new one (Bitcoin) to be widespread. Notice that separation of church and state took a while.

But it is coming.

Michael

[tmj]

MSK

I'm totally orange (maximalist) re money, as a currency Bitcoin is to date the most safe/free store of value and facilitator of trade.

The victims of the Holodomor would not have been saved with Bitcoin. They needed the human enjoyment of actual wealth, they were denied the consumption of their wealth, their food was taken from them.

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

2 hours ago, tmj said:

The victims of the Holodomor would not have been saved with Bitcoin. They needed the human enjoyment of actual wealth, they were denied the consumption of their wealth, their food was taken from them.

T,

Of course they would have been saved--if there had been an Internet back in the 30s and thereabouts and if Bitcoin had been the currency of Russia.

Why?

Because Russia would not have been able to be Communist using Bitcoin.

No guns.

 

Bitcoin removes the state guns from money. If those peasant farmers had been using Bitcoin back then, they would have sold their goods to anyone and everyone else using Bitcoin.

The Holodomor only happened because of guns. I can't imagine the farmers giving over their farm produce just because some government agent comes along and says the government wants it. I don't know how to cuss in Russian, but I imagine that would have been the response if there were no guns.

But even with guns, you can take wheat and pigs with guns. You can't take Bitcoin. What would the government confiscate if they had sold off their produce? The Bitcoins? No way.

Don't forget that peasants in Russia were not created unarmed by the communists oppressing them. They were created that way by the royalty before.

Ultimately, though, it's odd to me to imagine Bitcoin in historical periods where no Internet existed. Sort of like trying to imagine the American form of government happening in ancient Babylonia or ancient Persia (etc.) where nobody had books and people were mostly illiterate.

 

Michael

[tmj]

So we are agreed then, bottom up it is.

God bless the bottom!

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

T,

You betcha.

Michael