Lottery or The Dream Tax

"The lottery is for people that don't understand math" is a quote I once used frequently.  But even the players of the lottery would never question the statement.  I thought I would take a minute or two of your time to explain in common everyday terms what the lottery odds really look like in the real world.
The best way I can do this is to use something you are familiar with.  I will use the example of paper; just a small slip of a page.

The difficulty of correctly picking the correct number in the fairly universal MegaLotto:(5/56+1/46) that means you pick 5 unique numbers from 1 to 56 and another number from 1 to 46. Well how many number sets are there? Well grab your calculator and multiply 56*55*54*53*52*46 = 21,085,384,320
That is you have odds of 21 billion to one
In my example, I am going to print out all the possible numbers that win the lotto.  So we start in the upper left corner and start typing in the numbers  01 12 23 34 45 06  as an example.  How many of the sextuplets can we print on a page.

• All sextuplets take 18 spaces to type
• Leaving 2 spaces between the groups for separation 
• We can print 6 sets of numbers across one line.  
• Multiply that times 150 lines on a page, 
• We can print a total of 900 sets of numbers on one page.  

Now we have to see how many pieces of paper it will take to print all that, then divide that into reams and the reams into boxes find the volume of a box, and find out how many rooms that will take. then we head to a "U Store IT' building with 10 8x10 rooms 8 feet tall.  In each room we can stuff a little more than 500 boxes.

Well that was the math and here is what you must do to get the correct sextuplet:

• You have to pick the right door: 1 of 10, 
• then you have to pick the right box: 1 of 500, 
• then you have to pick the right ream of paper in that box 1 of 10, 
• then you have to pick the right sheet of paper in that ream 1 of 500 
• finally you pick the right row and column for the sextuplet on the page: 1 of 900.  

Finding the right door is tough, then the right box. and on, Why don't you win, because the number of sextuplet sets is too large.  Yes, someone wins once in a while, but as the weeks pass with no winner and the jackpot gets into the hundreds of millions of dollars.  Many more people are drawn to bet.  For most of you it is not much money, a dollar or five dollars, but look in the impoverished communities where the lines go down the block.  Twenty, fifty even a hundred dollars is bet.
What is hard to fathom is that even if you took one million dollars and bet all unique numbers, you odds would still be require you to find the right ream of paper, 21,085 to one.  The lottery is for people who want to dream the great dream of being rich beyond belief: able to buy a mansion, to buy several sports cars;  it is for people who pay the government for cheating them.  It is a tax on dreams, a tax on being downtrodden and worst of all a tax on hope.