Negative numbers baffle scratchcard buyers.

There is an easy solution to this problem. Get rid of all the games crap on the cards, and you just scratch one number - the amount you win. Maybe then people will begin to see how stupid these things are.
 
dacium2007 said:
There is an easy solution to this problem. Get rid of all the games crap on the cards, and you just scratch one number - the amount you win. Maybe then people will begin to see how stupid these things are.
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I like it. Most of the tickets would simply say "You lost $1."
 
Soapy Sam said:
If what's meant is "Bigger" , then -6 is bigger than -5.
If you have $0 and spend $6 is your debt not bigger, higher, deeper or larger than if you spend $5? Minus 6 is a larger quantity than minus 5, exactly as 6 is a larger quantity than 5.
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You can't do that.

What do I mean by that? Change what you are measuring.

If you say I have -5 dollars, you are saying that is how much money you have. You have -5 dollars, and your debt is +5. On the other hand, if your debt is -5, then you have +5 dollars.

So, if you have -5 dollars, and I have -6 dollars, who has more money? You do. The question of who has more debt is entirely different. You can't answer the question of who has more money with who has more debt.
 
Negative numbers seem to be increasingly acceptable in accountancy. Recently I bought a sledgehammer, and received an invoice for +1.00000 sledgehammers. So, no integers. But at first attempted use of the tool, it split, so I returned it. I then received an invoice for minus 1.00000 sledgehammers. So an agricultural hardware store in a remote area of Wales, UK, had the concept of selling someone -1.00000 items. Not easy.
 
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Janot said:
Negative numbers seem to be increasingly acceptable in accountancy. Recently I bought a sledgehammer, and received an invoice for +1.00000 sledgehammers. So, no integers. But at first attempted use of the tool, it split, so I returned it. I then received an invoice for minus 1.00000 sledgehammers. So an agricultural hardware store in a remote area of Wales, UK, had the concept of selling someone -1.00000 items. Not easy.
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Hmm your number of sledgehammers is accurate to 5 decimal places.

I have to wonder what 1.05784 sledgehammers would be.
 
People think of cold as a quantifiable thing. So, the bigger the number after the negative sign, the more cold you have. Therefore, a bigger, colder temperature.
 
NorwegianSquirrel said:
Maybe they should have included a little scale?

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 -1 -2 -3 -4 -5 -6 -7 -8 -9 ?

"If your number is on the right side of the number on the card, you are a winner!"
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How about a nice picture of a thermometer next to it, with the negative numbers at the bottom and the positive numbers at the top? Surely that should clear up the "higher-lower" issue.
 
Ladewig said:
I like it. Most of the tickets would simply say "You lost $1."
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I watch people misjudge what they have won and lost all the time. In general if some has played a bunch of tickets in one sitting and claim to have won about $200.00 they likely lost about $400.00. This ratio seems to be pretty consistent with nearly all regular players.

Not long ago a guy came in with some friends and said he usually always wins. He bought a dollar ticket and it payed him a dollar. He said, "see, I won". I asked him, "What did you win, the right to keep your money?" He looked at me like he didn't understand and said, "A dollar."

If the ticket actually said, "You lost $1." some people will say, "That's not right, I'm not supposed to pay more if I lose." The lottery commission actually engineers the games and how they pay to take advantage of the way these people think.

The scam goes deeper.
(Rough numbers based on a $10 million dollar win)
State collects $20 million.
State puts $10 million in winnings.
State buys bonds $5 million to pay that $10 million
(cash option pays what those bonds would have cost)
State and federal taxes are collected (2.3 million)
So overall government collects $20 million and pays $2.7 million and people think it will save them. It's a fools bet even if the odds were not so ridiculous.
 
What state are you referring to? Everywhere I've read the state laws that create the lotteries, when they say: "prizes equal 50% of sales" they mean exactly that for every $1 taken in they set aside $.50 in the prize pool. Buying annuities to pay the jackpot allows them to claim a much higher jackpot than the actual value.
 
Dan O. said:
What state are you referring to? Everywhere I've read the state laws that create the lotteries, when they say: "prizes equal 50% of sales" they mean exactly that for every $1 taken in they set aside $.50 in the prize pool. Buying annuities to pay the jackpot allows them to claim a much higher jackpot than the actual value.
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You may have caught me with misinformation here. I'm in Ga.
A quick search found this;
http://www.galottery.com/gen/aboutUs/faq.jsp#1
Q.Why is the Cash Option different than the advertised Jackpot?
A.The Georgia Lottery Corporation advertises its jackpots at the estimated 26-year annuity value for Mega Millions. When players choose the annuity option on their prize, the Georgia Lottery pays the prize out over 26 years by buying U.S. Government Treasury Securities, which earn interest and mature annually over the time period. That annual return is the amount winners receive each year for the 26 year period. With Cash Option, the Lottery takes the amount of money that would have been invested and pays it directly to the winner in one payment. Both payment options have federal and state taxes deducted from them.
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Not clearly specific but seems to support your claim. The "Georgia Lottery for Education Act" doesn't define it either.
http://www.galottery.com/uploads/LotteryReportList/LotteryReport/1/LotteryforEducationAct.pdf

If you have anything more specific I would like to know. I would expect it to be in line with other states so I would accept that also.
 
Dan O. said:
The Georgia Lottery Corp. Annual Reportpdf gives the breakdown of where your money from lottery ticket sales goes.
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I'm having a hard time reading that but the graph on page 5 seems to support you. However, this is all games combined including scratch & win. The large proportion of payouts on scratch & win are free tickets or null result wins and total sales volume outstrips lottery sales. If you average in a lot of null result wins (100% payouts on individual sales) in the total average you would expect it to increase the total payout as a percentage. Since payment is required to be in the form another ticket but is must be rang up as another sale it can increase apparent payouts significantly.

Consider a single sale where the buyer wins a free ticket 3 times in a row (not unusual). Now off of that one sale 4 apparent sales are created. That's a 75% payout averaged in that pie chart. So then how does the overall average remain so close to 50%?

To see it more clearly consider a set of 20 sequential $1 tickets.
Suppose we have 14 losers, 5 free tickets, and one $5 winner.

[Real sales]
Real sales = $15 because five were free.
Real payout = $5 because free tickets only cost them a piece of paper.
Real payout % = 33%

[Apparent sales]
Apparent sales = $20 (Clerks are required to ring up all tickets free or not)
Apparent payout = $10 (5 payed in free ticket, $5 payed in wins)
Apparent payout % = 50%

This is tantamount to printing your own money and hiding it in a numbers game with null sales. So if in fact payouts on regular lottery is ~50% scratch & win can't pay as claimed and maintain the overall 50% statistics as published. If the real scratch & win payout is as claimed they must reduce the actual cost to payout on lottery to maintain the overall 50%. If done in lottery it can only occur through the reduced cost of buying bonds.

I suppose they can make the legal argument if done through bond purchases that the winners can in fact receive the money as promised. This is tantamount to my original claim. It's also tantamout to collecting bond interest up front from winners and using it to cover all the money they printed themselves while the winner must wait on the bonds to mature to get the promised 50%.

If there is a simpler explanation of what they are really doing to meet legal payout requirements where is it?
 
Skip past the fluff at the beginning and down to the real report. On page 21 they give the actual ticket sales and the number of those that are prize tickets (about 7%). It appears that they deduct the prize tickets from ticket revenues and don't count them as prizes. (Otherwise there could be 222 million that just slipped into someone's pocket :()

Prizes as a percentage of net ticket sales is about 61%.
 
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