Are you poor?

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I'm not poor but I have trouble managing money and people take advantage of me being nice.

Yes

i guaran-GD-tee ya that i would be smart with the money, i would not squander a gift from god like those lotto-winning lucky fools who blew it all. those poor souls surely failed the gumdrop test of life.

god bless you, and welcome to WP

The wyatt earp effect is a likely culprit. The odds that somebody achieves an unlikely event are much higher than the odds of an individual achieving an unlikely event.

Say I flip a coin 40 times. The odds of it landing heads 40 times in a row are 1 in a trillion. However suppose everyone on earth takes 10 chances to flips a coin 40 times.

There is a 51% chance that on one of those coin flipping attempts by one of the people on earth that they'll get heads 40 times in a row. Higher if one of them happens to be named Rosencrantz or Guildenstern.

If I were greedy, I'd love to bet against you. To avoid poverty, it is important to actually do the math, and get it right.

i gots to know- will you please give me here an example of the math involved?

Using a calculator, enter .5. That's the odds of getting heads the first time.
Hit X and =. You get .25, the chance of getting heads twice.
Hit = again, and that's the odds for three times in a row, and so on.
You will notice that you are not getting numbers with lots of zeroes, and that you'll have to go find something with scientific notation to cover 40 X.

Statistics is actually trickier than it looks, though, when any complexity enters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2tNxIaGpR4 This isn't the best presentation I've seen, but if a group has a 1% chance of having cancer, and the test is 90% accurate, people who test positive actually have less than a 10% chance of having cancer. Drug companies are always cooking their results with statistical tricks to sell more pills.

2^40= 1.095 * 10^12 also known as 1.095 trillion. That's the number of combinations from flipping a coin 40 times in a row.

The chances of getting 40 heads in a row in 40 tries is exactly 1 combination out of the 1.095 trillion combinations. The chance of getting this combination is 9.09*10^-13. The chance of not getting this is (1-9.09*10^-13). The chance of nobody out of 7 billion people getting it in 10 tries is (1-9.09*10^-13)^7,000,000,000^10.

When I calculate it again I get a 93% chance of it not happening, so only a 7% chance of it happening. It looks like I added a 0 by accident to my 7 billion . So for the 50% chance you need either everyone to attempt it 100 times, or for there to be 70 billion people.

Dear_one I guarantee you wouldn't want to bet against me. I'm a lot more careful when I actually bet and am not sleep deprived.

Statistics is incredibly difficult, but probability is not. For example the cancer test probability is easily calculated.

1% has cancer. The test is 90% accurate, so 0.9% get a true positive, while 0.1% get a false negative.

99% does not have cancer. The test is 90% accurate, so 9.9% get a false positive, while 89.1% get a true negative.

10.8% receive a positive test result of which 0.9% actually have cancer. Thus, if you test positive on the test you have an 8.3% chance of having cancer.

89.2% receive a negative test result, of which 89.1% do not have cancer. Thus, is you test negative there is a 99.8% chance that you do not have cancer.

I’m poor because I’m so indecisive and can’t decide what to do with myself or what I can handle.

I need something that’s very low stress, that has flexible hours, and that would be alright with a service dog.

The things that I’d really like to do would require some training which would be difficult to get because I’d have to commute a ways and it’d be difficult to afford - probably not feasible.

Childcare would be problematic as well.

Maybe I’ll figure out what to do with myself by the time I’m 65.

I don’t mind being poor because I’m pretty minimalist and love doing things that don’t cost any money at all, but I need to be more self-sufficient. As it is, I’m stuck in permanent adolescence.

i suspect that if numbers didn't make my head spin, i'd not be poor.

Poverty has not been problem to me as such but it makes me feel alienated from the other people when they constantly complain how difficult it is to live by welfare grants while I find it easy myself (this probably would not apply in the US) and those grants have given me a disincentive to find a job.

I occasionally have lucky streaks with money. I have to be careful as it can lead to losing just as fast. When I was still in graduate school, I won over $1000 one night at a local l casino playing nickel slots. The next day I invested $900 of it in one of my hobbies. It is now worth around $5000 if I cashed it in. However, I count that toward my retirement funds, so I am forced to leave it alone. If I would have kept playing with the money, it would have been long gone by now. I have found out that I generally suck at managing money on day to day things, but can do the long term investment route ok.

Me too. We would call it off. While I was still writing I found I'd initially lost 3 zeroes, but I was too sleepy to haul out the big hardware and go exact.

Regarding the wealthy playing...I'm merely stating they have an advantage if they choose to, and in the past some of the winners have been people who were already wealthy. I'm not at all saying they, as a class, prolifically play.

As to organized teams, they're called lottery pools. Most of these are set up to reduce risk, but one could manage such an operation with the considerations of probable sequences and maximize potential.

As to the individual doubting that some sequences are better...the only way the odds would be something like 350 million to 1 is if you have a drawing of a single number between 1 and 350,000,000.

I ask you again...go calculate winning numbers with purely odd numbers as a percentage of all winning numbers. You'll find that percentage to be rather low, and likewise for evens. Go calculate the ones with odds and evens, you'll find the vast majority of them have this quality. This alone demonstrates that some sequences (in this case...ones with a mixture of evens and odds) are more probable than others (in this case...ones with purely evens or odds)

Also I'm not trying to give individuals the impression they can beat this game even with the most rigorous statistical analysis of the distribution of winning numbers. I'm saying they can play smarter if they want to. Don't pick 1, 2, 3, 4, 5