LOL-January 4
Cidu Bill on Jan 4th 2010
Filed in Argyle Sweater, Arlo and Janis, Basketcase Comix, Bill Bickel, Dave Coverly, Far Left Side, Jimmy Johnson, John Deering, Retail, Rina Piccolo, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Scott Hilburn, Speed Bump, Strange Brew, Wizard of Oz, Zach Weiner, comic strips, comics, comics that made us laugh out loud, global warming, lol | 26 responses so far
Tim Jan 4th 2010 at 12:44 am 1
I love the SMBC one. You are more likely to be hit by lightning twice than hitting the lottery. I’ve heard a variation, “The lottery is a tax on ignorance.”
Rob W Jan 4th 2010 at 02:08 am 2
My father-in-law calls the lottery a tax on the mathematically challenged. I’m definitely sending him this strip.
Ashley Jan 4th 2010 at 03:05 am 3
Am I missing something on the twins one?
I suspect his odd bald spot has something to do with it, but I can’t quite figure it out.
lisa Jan 4th 2010 at 04:11 am 4
Ashley, he changed the balloon– not funny but that’s the gag… the bald spot is just bad art
chuckers Jan 4th 2010 at 05:20 am 5
Like Ashley, there are a couple of strips up there that I had to look closely at in order to understand. The Wizard of Oz and the Birds in traffic took me a bit.
I could be just slow after the New Year’s celebrations I didn’t really participate in.
yellojkt Jan 4th 2010 at 06:04 am 6
The wait for recognition is what makes the bird one funny.
Dan Jan 4th 2010 at 07:14 am 7
Lack of coffee - when I read “wiper fluid” I first thought that the strip was using the other definition of “wiper” in the context of changing a baby’s diaper..
Andrew McGrae Jan 4th 2010 at 08:13 am 8
@Tim - the best one I heard was from Derren Brown. Given average death rates, if you are an average middle aged man with a single lottery ticket one hour before the draw, by the time it takes place you are more likely to be dead than rich.
Carl Jan 4th 2010 at 08:20 am 9
If you liked the Oz one, you’ll enjoy this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=munbt8qpCiQ
mkilby Jan 4th 2010 at 08:46 am 10
Where can I get one of those calendars? It would be the perfect return gift for all those people who keep giving me calendars I don’t need (or want).
Jeff S. Jan 4th 2010 at 09:33 am 11
How does he milk the cows if they are all floating?
Elyrest Jan 4th 2010 at 11:24 am 12
Jeff S. (#11) - it doesn’t matter because what’s gonna come shooting out of them ain’t first ain’t gonna be milk.
I’ve never bought a lottery ticket. My brother has given them to me as gifts though. I was unreasonably excited before the drawings and unreasonably pissed afterward. The way I finally decided to look at it was that he had given me the gift of unreasonable hope. It was short hope, but fun nevertheless. (I still think I’d rather have the money in the future.)
furrykef Jan 4th 2010 at 01:02 pm 13
The wait for recognition is what makes the bird one funny.
I got it immediately, so I didn’t find it funny.
As for the lottery thing, not everybody who buys lottery tickets is an ignorant fool. Some people buy lottery tickets exactly because the money goes to education. Of course, one could argue why they don’t just donate the money to education directly, but that’s more of a matter of human nature.
As a former semiprofessional gambler (and a mildly successful one), though, I would never even touch the lottery. I only play gambles that I can win, and for me that generally means a poker game full of weak opponents.
- Kef
mike Jan 4th 2010 at 01:35 pm 14
whether or not buying a lottery ticket is rational depends on the value to you of the cost of the ticket vs. the value of the possible reward. hint: the value of money isn’t linearly related to the amount of dollars. I may be well enough off that the cost of a lottery ticket here or there doesn’t make much difference, but not so rich that a huge payoff wouldn’t transform my life.
of course, a lot of the people who buy lottery tickets can’t even really afford the tickets, which is why I’m still opposed to the government using them to fleece- uh TAX the electorate. plus, the hypocrisy involved in the government making gambling illegal and then running a gambling operation makes smoke come out my ears
Winter Wallaby Jan 4th 2010 at 02:04 pm 15
The claim that the money goes to education doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It’s just a shell game, the state isn’t going to suddenly decide to spend more on education just because there’s a fund marked “for education.” If, as part of your salary, your boss gave you a $20 bill and wrote on it “for groceries,” just because you used that specific bill for groceries, that wouldn’t make you increase your grocery budget for each month. You’d just use less of the remainder of your salary for groceries. Same thing here.
True, but in any reasonable model, the utility of $1 should decrease as your wealth increases, making the lottery an even worse bargain.
paperboy Jan 4th 2010 at 02:07 pm 16
The thing about the state lottery is that somebody DOES win. Sure, the odds against winning are high, but where else can you turn $1 into millions? As long as one doesn’t spend non-disposable income there’s no problem. I don’t think governments object to gambling morally, just that it’s notoriously hard to collect taxes from gambling operations. What steams me is that California set up the state lottery to aid schools, yet still we’re asked to approve school bond measures practically every year. Where does the lottery money go?
turquoise cow Jan 4th 2010 at 03:26 pm 17
I used to sell lottery tickets, and I knew many people who would literally spend hundreds of dollars on tickets every week (some every day). I sold lotto tickets at two different establishments for a grand total of about six years. In all that time I never knew anyone who won the “big one.” We had a couple of customers win a few thousand dollars, but I never knew anyone who one something like a million or anything close to enough money to retire on. Most people won a couple bucks or a couple hundred bucks, and most of those people just threw their winnings into more tickets.
I’m not a math person, but I figured that the odds were pretty slim in favor of my every winning a great amount if none of my customers ever won very much. Near the end, I was so sick of the job and so against the entire establishment that whenever regulars would come in with a list of numbers for me to punch I felt like saying “Why? You’re not going to win.” And most of them would get very upset if you didn’t tend to them immediately.
paperboy Jan 4th 2010 at 04:18 pm 18
Yeah, turquoise cow#17, the people who spend hundreds of dollars weekly on tickets every week are silly (at best), but, really, they’d probably squander it some other way if the lottery wasn’t available. (If I had hundreds of dollars a week I could gamble, I’d feel I’d ALREADY won the lottery.)
Jeff S. Jan 4th 2010 at 05:39 pm 19
I remember a 1980s movie starring Rob Lowe called “Oxford Blues.” Lowe plays a valet in Las Vegas. One day a rich lady client offers him money in exchange for sex. The lottery discussion always reminds me of their conversation –
She: “What would you do with $100?”
He: “Blow it!”
She: “And with $1000?”
He: “Spend it!”
She: “And $5000?”
He: “Invest it!” He then plays it all on the roulette, wins, and goes to Oxford.
From what I’ve seen, unless you hit some sort of mega jackpot, most people just spend their winnings on more tickets. I mean, I’ll throw some money in on the Powerball once the jackpot gets pretty high, but I also don’t go crazy with it either.
aoeu Jan 4th 2010 at 07:40 pm 20
I disagree about the lottery. I’m well acquainted with statistics and I see the draw - you won’t miss $5/week if you buy a ticket. Except you’re not even spending that; around here lotteries pay out 60+%. So, by the statistics you’re spending $2/week on a lottery ticket. You definitely won’t miss that. Basically, you’re spending a small amount of money for some hope - matching 4/6 numbers is worth several tens of thousands of dollars and would make your year. I think it’s a reasonable investment if it doesn’t hurt your finances.
George P Jan 4th 2010 at 08:22 pm 21
The problem is that the lottery isn’t funded by people spending five bucks a week. They make their money from people spending $50-$100 a week on tickets, and those are the people least able to afford it. It’s not that they can afford to waste the money; it’s that they need to do something to get out of the hole they are in, and they’ve been told by a trusted source, their state governments, that this is a good way to do it.
I think gambling should be legal, but I don’t the the government should be involved in selling false hope.
In Georgia the lottery is the mechanism by which the poor fund the college education of the middle class, which is very close to this cartoon.
Chuck Jan 4th 2010 at 09:31 pm 22
In California, middle class college students don’t qualify for much financial aid, and man do they complain about it. Most of it goes to working class students, who would probably trade places with those middle class kids in an instant.
The Bad Seed Jan 5th 2010 at 01:48 am 23
1. As the owner of a small parrot (with slightly-clipped/trimmed wings) who loves to run/fly free when I’m home, I’m on a constant search for droppings, so I got the car trip cartoon right away! However, if we’re riding in the car he’s trained to go on the dashboard and not on me OR the windshield!
2. Wow, someone actually buys a lottery ticket to selflessly support the noble beneficiaries of the lottery? Really??? Personally, I figure a buck is a small price to pay for 5 minutes or so (sometimes more, depending on the potential prize) of excitement and daydreaming a lottery ticket brings to me. I buy less than one lottery ticket per year on average, and it cheers me up more than a greeting card generally does (which generally cost more than a buck), so what the heck. And I figure that, since the odds are so small anyway, my odds are the same as someone who buys a thousand tickets for the same drawing. But the people who spend hundreds or thousands of dollars per year on lotteries, thinking it’s really their way out, make me sad.
PepperjackCandy Jan 5th 2010 at 12:29 pm 24
(If I had hundreds of dollars a week I could gamble, I’d feel I’d ALREADY won the lottery.)
This.
Also, The Bad Seed (#23), how did you train your bird to go on the dashboard?
FeelinOld Jan 5th 2010 at 05:23 pm 25
People do win, I can’t be bothered buying the tickets, but my personal opinion is that there should be a top end cap on the prizes, and if they get beyond that there are multiple draws, instead of one 50Million prize, make it 50 prizes of 1 million, to most people playing I think 1 million would be a life changing amount, if it isn’t why are you playing the lottery?
I personally know 4 people who have won ‘life changing’ amounts in the lottery of course life changing can mean different things, one was a cousin who was about to drop out of university because she was having difficulty making ends meet, she grabbed a scratch ticket in a what the hey moment and won 10K which was enough to help her through her last year and a half (this was a while ago when 10K to a ’starving student’ was huge)
The second recently won 250K, they used a bit to do a family trip and the rest is set aside for their daughters education.
So in those two cases the lottery money really did go towards education…
The third played religiously, won just under 500K and is now retired amd enjoying a quiet life (they had been scrimping and saving to retire early anyways).
The fourth, won 800K and managed to blow it all within two years and is back working full time paycheque to paycheque and is bitter as heck (nobodies fault but their own).
Igelino Jan 30th 2010 at 04:50 pm 26
@Pepperjack #24 - don’t train it to go on the dashboard! The windshield is better because then you just turn on the wipers to clean it up.
All little birds are trained to go on the windshield.