h a l f b a k e r yWhat's a nice idea like yours doing in a place like this?
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Global Lottery
A world-scale lottery designed to create destabilizing individuals | |
Lotteries are strange beasts. People spend a small but
not
insignificant amount of money for the insignificant
chance
of winning a very large amount of money. If people
operated logically, they wouldn't do it. But it's not
logical.
You're buying the chance to daydream about houses with
tennis courts or telling your boss exactly what you think
of
them.
The participation in lotteries seems to have a non-linear
relationship with the prize money... double rollover
week?
I'll take 4 tickets thanks! Last time the Pennsylvania
Powerball prize got over $150 million there was a buzz
around the entire admin floor of my building and nothing
got done for a week*. So, if we expand the idea out to
the
whole globe, what would happen?
In this version, the lottery needs to be organized so that
it
produces individual winners only. Large collectives of
ticket buyers & lower levels of win are out. It's all or
nothing. Quick research suggests the global lottery
market
is approaching $500 billion/year<link>. If I'm right about
the bigger prizes exponentially attracting participation, I
see no reason why we can't get 20% of that market. A
$10-
100 billion lottery prize draw would also surely be a
global
event - extra revenue for the taking there.
The goal is not wealth re-distribution, but the
concentration of massive wealth into one individual.
Why?
Well, because it's going to be interesting mainly.
Currently,
people worth $10-100 billion exist largely due to a mix of
luck & psychopathy. What's more, they don't actually
HAVE
the kind of money the headline figures suggest - To get
the
cash, the likes of Bezos & Musk would have to gently
bleed
out shares for years. I'm not sure there's anyone with
close
to $10-100 billion in liquid assets.
The global lottery will start to create them randomly
from
the general population - this is a critical feature, most
people are quite nice and unencumbered by a miserable
psychotic obsession with ROI etc. What opportunities
does
such wealth provide? One hell of a debit card? The
ability
to create essentially anything from the ground up? run
for
office without the grubby deals - hell, you could
essentially
buy one of the poorer nations.
This is the interesting part, our random people will care
about their own issues - likely the issues that affect
normal
people around the globe. But these people will waste the
money, Shirley? Maybe, you can give irresponsible people
millions, and they can waste it, see any lottery. Mike
Tyson
lost ~$400 million. But can you waste 10-100 billion?** I
think it would be difficult in one lifetime, Tyson was
already working hard - gold bathtubs, tigers & divorces
hard, and he's still rich. Like fast cars? Well, you can't
waste it there, you have enough to buy Ferrari - all of it.
Now you have a profitable company.
Perhaps with a decade of mismanagement you could
hollow
the company out - but it's dysfunction will likely show up
under conditions of financial stress & the government
will
bail you out to keep the jobs and you're still left with the
history/image rights/IP etc. worth billions.
In most cases we generate individuals that will be
staggeringly rich and influential for life. Normal people,
for
the most part who know it's luck, not their specialness
that
got them there***. That should shake up the Davos
meetings.
*A slight improvement on the average.
** A lot of what follows is clearly based on an inflation-
adjusted Brewster's Millions.
*** The ticket, check, cargo ship full of gold bars etc.
associated with the win should all prominently display
"Remember: you got lucky", or similar.
Loadsamoney
https://youtu.be/gXuRvthgn4U
[Frankx, Oct 07 2021]
[link]
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// create destabilizing individuals // |
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"Crypto-equity" tries to do this, and only fails due to
extensive work by governments to identify and
entrap/arrest unstable/destabilizing individuals before
they can, hypothetically, crowd-source significant
amounts of untraceable cryptocurrency to hire patsies
for political activism. The powers that be don't want
that. Maybe it's wise to prevent this kind of thing. |
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It would take a lot to really destabilize anything, and ten
billion wouldn't do it. Libya's President-for-life Quadaffi
had more than this and was made an example of when
he went against the established powers, and his
truckloads of gold bars were captured, and then he got
a comedy movie parodying his life made about him
(The Dictator, 2012). |
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They did get him in the end, but it took 40 years. My
argument is that the average person would behave in a
manner that didn't wasn't perceived as provocation to the
powers that be. Although I suspect quite a lot of things are
provocative. Spend a few billion looking at political
corruption and see where that gets you. |
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//will be ... influential for life//
Unfortunately, most people won't know HOW to be
"influential", regardless of bank balance. Buying lots of "stuff"
isn't influencing anything. Even hiring "business management"
types to assist with the influencing won't help, because most
of them are too self-serving. |
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Lottery [-]
Loadsamoney [+] |
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Usually there is a team to help you come to terms with your sudden windfall. In this case it could be a think tank of all the de-stabilizing options available. |
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I suspect though, at this level, If the wrong people are annoyed some contracts will be physically enforced. |
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//double rollover week? I'll take 4 tickets thanks!// |
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As the prize money increases given the same ticket price the actual value of a ticket increases. Multiply the odds by the cost of the ticket, that's the value. A 20% chance to win $5 is worth $1. A 20% chance to win $10 is worth $2. But people also tend to forget that taxes cut that prize in half and sharing the winning number can cut it by larger percentages. And as more people play the odds of being the only person to pick the winning numbers falls. Also people forget the actual prize is about half the listed prize because they offer it as a multi-year payout. The future value is unaccounted. So say you share a winning ticket for a million dollars with one other person. You have half the prize because it's shared (500k), half the prize because of taxes (250k) and half yet again because what you actually won was a $250 thousand payment spread out over 20 years. (about $1050 per month and NOT adjusted for inflation) So if you take it immediately your 1 million dollar prize is worth about $125,000. That's enough to solve a lot of problems but certainly not enough to immediately retire or even enough to buy a really nice house. |
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Make that a $2,000,000,000 grand prize and you again divide it by 8 (if there's one other winner) to account for taxes, sharing, and future value. It's now $250,000,000. You're on easy street but you're not even rubbing elbows with the REAL elite. And if you're not careful you can easily lose it all due to thinking you won two billion dollars and spending/wasting accordingly. A couple of bathtubs with golden lions, a nice estate, a nice school for your kids, a couple of cars and that's it. You're done. Better get a reverse mortgage and start cooking your own food again. |
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//it's dysfunction will likely show up under conditions of financial stress & the government will bail you out to keep the jobs and you're still left with the history/image rights/IP etc. worth billions. // |
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Mismanagement needs to be punished. Surely you're not seriously proposing a lottery that comes with taxpayer support for life? A few winners could amount to a serious drag on the world's economy. |
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