A rogue Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
An iPod was given away once per day, except Monday, when they were given out once per hour. I was competing against the rest of Switzerland. Each code had to be entered on a website, earning 0, 5, 10, 20 or 50 points. You could then choose how many points to gamble during the day/hour, and would hear at the end of the day/hour whether you won.
The school had a bottle-cap recycling bin. Every day, I dug through that looking for Coke caps. I volunteered for GAOS (a theatre group) and served drinks outside their show, collecting many paper wrappers from glass bottles.
After collecting 1500 points, at 2 am on a Monday night, I struck with half my points. And I failed! Shocked, I tried again at 3 am, risking all the remaining points I'd saved up. And I won! I was the "lucky" recipient of a 2GB iPod Nano.
Was it worth it? Yes, because I was under the employment age. I couldn't have earned money legally, so my opportunity cost of time was low.
Earlier, in primary school, the classes bought Pizza Hut once a week. During a promotion, their pizza boxes were printed with stars, which could be saved up and exchanged for free pizza. So I went around and asked all the teachers for their old boxes, cut out the stars, and got a second pizza every week!
If only it were that easy for me to find a job nowadays, despite a first-class MEng in Electronic Systems Engineering and 4 years continuous relevant work experience. Even trying to follow the rules and get all the qualifications doesn't seem to work.
As a broke kid who has never won anything in his life, getting that Xbox (right at launch no less) was AMAZING. I was literally dancing with excitement which I don't think has ever happened since.
I sold it after a few months (was more of a PC gamer) and the hundreds that I got for it was also awesome.
However, I did find a way to convert UBS KeyClub points into cash. They're a loyalty-card system similar to frequent flyer miles, and are worth 1 CHF per point. When my friends visited Geneva, we planned to spend the points in the Manora restaurant. But it was shut! After some thought, we found a store willing to accept the points, bought a suitcase, and returned it immediately for a cash refund. Then we had cash to buy a cheese fondue!
The exchange rate was even better when I could exchange points for iTunes songs - the songs were worth 1.40 CHF. So that's how I collected a lot of legal music in the early days of the iTunes Music Store.
The cheese ones are so yummy...
I tried emailing computer repair shops asking them to advertise my data migration services - using an Apple II to copy off 5.25" floppies, a Mac LC to read DD floppies, and a PowerBook G3 to read SCSI and JAZ disks. Unfortunately, I only got one reply that asked to see a poster before they'd even discuss it with management.
I also tried I tried contacting companies via Seek and TradeMe. Most expect me to already have a work visa. I asked recruiters for help. I put side projects here on Hacker News to try to get attention. I asked friends who I worked with at Fisher & Paykel Healthcare when I was there before. I found random people on Github and offered to work for free on open-source projects just to get an introduction. Nothing has worked. The only interview I had was from an Australian company. Now I'm spamming everyone on the Accredited Employers list who has an email address on their website. I'm willing to take whatever I can get now, wherever that might be.
I wonder what kind of theory or model could be drafted, something that fits the situation like a glove _and_ exposes critical leverage points.
If anyone could do it...(points at you)
For a long-term career I have the education & work experience prerequisites for New Zealand's Skilled Migrant Category, Australia's 186, and Canada's Express Entry.
In the past, I did two remote contracts (Pixelgarde and AnswerTo), but in both cases the employer reached out to me first. I'm not really sure how to find jobs. My résumé is here:
I’d cut it to 1 page, remove all the symbols, flags and logos. I’d also remove most of the extra stuff (personal interests, volunteering, objective, references).
Essentially, almost anything that doesn’t show that I’m a very talented engineer should go. Also, I’d consider using latex if not already and go for a more sobre style that focuses on ease of reading. The way your education part is indented is great, the work experience part seems to have something wrong with it.
I’ve hired a number of engineers and I would likely not look at this one for more than a few seconds. When recruiting, you get a deluge of resumes, there’s simply not time to carefully read them all, so the sad truth is you have to resort to heuristics and look for anything at all that lets you discard.
Please comment back if you need help editing your resume, happy to provide some help.
While LaTeX is cool, my advice would be to grab a resume template from a university career center and use it with zero style modifications.
Check out Gayle’s advice: https://www.careercup.com/resume
- make it a one page CV - remove any work experience that's not relevant - write in active voice about each experience. Quantifying your contributions - remove hobbies, particularly anything related to religion. It's not relevant, and is recommended not to include such personal info in your CV. - only show your undergraduate degree. No one cares about GDE (unless applying to grad school) or your high school grades. - remove personal interests; no one cares. It's distracting from selling your work experience. - remove references and write "available on request". Background check happen after interviews. - remove languages unless relevant to the job. - remove volunteering experience; why on earth have you included CouchSurfng there? - remove your address. Too personal. - add link to your LinkedIn. - remove objective. This should come through in your experience what you're interested in. - remove those images. They offer no value to the ready and take up 20% of both pages.
You find jobs by applying. That simple. Your CV must sell your work experience as valuable to the employee and current yours does not.
Assume employers will spend 30 seconds skimming it before deciding if you will get a chance. Your current CV does not cut it.
I counted the rough radius of the jar in 1-dimensional linear_jellybean units, as well as the height of the bean-filled part. Using the formula for the volume of the cylinder, I guessed the volume, in linear_jellybean^3 units. Through the sheer coincidence that a jellybean's volume is roughly 1 linear_jellybean^3, I got within 25 or so jellybeans of the correct count, winning the grand prize.
I walked away with a bunch of books, and the jar of jellybeans. I'm glad, that unlike in the story presented by this article, the CIA and the FBI did not get involved in the act, since I used method and cunning as opposed to dumb luck. Maybe it was just a matter of the dollar value at stake.
This is the only time in my entire life that I had to use the geometrical formula for volume of anything for a practical purpose.
As I type this I realize that each of those jellybeans was manhandled by someone during the counting process. I wonder if they used gloves.
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There are many theories of economy (capitalism, socialism, communism, ...) but one of them is hardly known and heavily censored since the 19th century. It is starting (in a much milder form) to resurface as the concept of "bullshit jobs". The old theory is roughly the following:
1) From the perspective of governments, as soon as productivity is sufficient to support survival (i.e. there is no longer a material lack of basic necessities), the next threat to government is disobedience. So the government supports in various ways the pacification or neutralization of disobedience. This can happen in various ways: by sorting pupils in all levels of school (elementary, high school and up) not just by skill (which ensures survival) but also by attitude (so that the disobedient don't gain too much intellect, and equivalently so that the resultant intellectuals are significantly obedient). Most of us with higher levels of education have vague memories of kids getting expelled from school due to disobedience, they all slowly got concentrated in less educational schools (for the disobedient). It is hard to emphasize we didn't realize how ridiculously obedient we were because our yardstick of obedience were other highly obedient pupils who had not yet been filtered away. Another way is welfare even if there is plenty of material wealth (for survival) if it promotes obedience. When or how does welfare promote societal stability? That depends on the individual: a disobedient person with free time and resources is relatively more dangerous than an obedient person with free time and resources.
2) From the perspective of employers, employees should be replacable, if they aren't replacable as if they were simple cogs and gears in a machine, survival would hinge on these select individuals. Regarding obedience, from a managerial bossing around perspective there is much more satisfaction from managing a disobedient person than an obedient person (the former is an achievement, while the latter is a given). People do what they like to do, so when a manager chooses to spend his time micromanaging specifically over a disobedient person, he is probably enjoying it.
3) From the perspective of the employee: the goal of jobs is first and foremost survival, but once survival is satisfied, individual goals starts kicking in, perhaps ideology, perhaps greed.
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So the effective modus operandi of the total system is: neutralize or pacify rebellion by
1) minimizing the intellect and skills of the disobedient and maximizing the skills and intellect of the obedient during education, while
2) prioritizing jobs to some unavoidable fraction of the skilled intellectuals that turn disobedient, in order to keep them busy with work. If a person is murdered, and a number of people are suspected, the unemloyed person falls under the highest suspicion.
Consider obedient person O and disobedient person D of the same level of skill, and a free job position at that level of skill, then the system has 2 options: put O on the job while D has free time, or put D on the job while O has free time. What would you choose if you were the system, trying to ensure stability post scarcity?
The "bullshit jobs" aren't bullshit jobs, at least not from the perspective of the status quo: it's just keeping people who are assessed as disobedient busy.
The last people to recognize this emergent behaviour are typically the most obedient people (the moment they realize they slowly become more and more disobedient, a process the already disobedient experienced during their education). Why are so many people reporting "aholes" at work? Because there actually are people acting as disobedient "aholes" at work. Some of this acting may be genuine, some of it is purely feigned to keep the job. It is unknown what percentage of disobedience is feigned disobedience to keep the job, or genuine disobedience. Any genuinely obedient person who eventually understood this working principle in society, and hence feigned disobedience in order to be assigned a job paying better than welfare, is afraid to speak out about it: the moment he describes this modus operandi, he is effectively revealing he isn't in fact disobedient, so he can be safely put back on welfare and make place at work for the neutralization by employment of a genuine disobedient person.
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In short, you may want to start signalling your dissatisfaction with society in order to be classified as slightly more dis-allegiant and thus a good candidate for being kept busy:
perhaps in subtle ways like replying the question "Why were you unemployed between ..." with "Yes, there is an attitude problem between me and the rest of the world, but the problem is not on my side"
perhaps in more obvious ways, like starting a blog and posting semi-extreme perspectives on society, with lots of normative and prescriptive language.
Anyway good luck, and don't forget to watch "La Couperette", it is genious!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Axe_(film)
Your comment may be even more fitting to my Ask HN about a fake résumé generator project. You're correct about my feelings of disobedience.
The fake résumé generator idea is brilliant. But I would beta-test this under a false email unrelated to your name, and in a slightly different target field.
I would suspect they typically check the last employer, or the one before to verify the reason of termination? Not sure though.
If the theory of allegiance holds any truth, it's because you acted too much like a person who is too good for this world.
The calculations are easy to do. You do need to estimate the number of people who buy the tickets so you can calculate the odds of sharing the jackpot. The real number isn't publicly available, but newspapers often have numbers for similar jackpots in the past.
As the article mentions, lotteries protect themselves by making it logistically impossible for anybody to buy every ticket.
Here's the calculation for Canada's Lotto 6/49 in 2007: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vHOOdmobb3729ezH1BnO...
If I have a one in a googol chance of winning a googolplex dollars, it doesn't really matter that the expected value is going to be huge, I still won't win anything because I'll be insolvent before the requisite number of tries to have a reasonable chance of winning.
If the EV was really significantly above 1.0 (say 1.5) then everyone would buy a lot of lotto tickets. It would be simple arbitrage. In reality all of those people buying extra tickets (because of the high perceived EV) would mean a higher chance of splitting the pot. Splitting the pot would reduce the real return by 1/2 for every person that purchased a ticket.
They have people printing tickets for an entire day. They pay stores to stay open late. It's a tactical operation.
Sometimes the jackpot is so anomalously big that the general public can't buy enough tickets to bring it back down below 1.0.
In scenario #1, there are 1.93 tickets sold for every possible combination, meaning that on average, 1.93 people win the jackpot. If you go ahead and buy every ticket, that means 2.93 tickets per combination, reducing EV from 1.11 to 0.78.
I wonder why they care. In fact, they need someone to win big, so as to entice future players...
If you assume that everyone else has the same basic odds of winning that you do (1 in a Million for example) you might play. But if you find out that you have a 1:1,000,000 chance and another well funded group has a 1:10 chance, you're going to quickly realize you're just throwing away money.
If an unfair game is equally unfair for everyone, it's fair. If it's only unfair for some/most people to a greater degree than some other people, then it's unfair.
To be fair, I do much the same thing. But, it doesn't really have a basis in logic. It's all psychological.
[1] http://www.bursa.ro/industria-de-gambling-iulie-1994-primul-...
> Records show that he funneled this cash into the Pacific Basin Fund, a Hong Kong-based account managed by his brother-in-law. “What we calculated to be the reality has changed,” he wrote in a 1994 letter to investors. “It may not seem such a hot investment now.” After that, his investor updates went cold.
Proof that it was a scam all along.
nope. he just bought all the tickets.
Given how well-known the Fibonacci sequence is today, poring through Liber Abaci (1202) in search of secret insights is teetering on the edge of madness.
Sounds like something straight out of Foucault's Pendulum.
Neither corporate lawyers nor government would ever acknowledge that loophole in a business models does not necessarily equals to fraud.
There's a lot of negations in there, I'm not sure if I'm reading it incorrectly, or you have one too many, but is sounds like you're saying that corporate lawyers and government will always maintain that a loophole in a business model is fraud?
Think about casinos banning players for counting cards in Black Jack: the only reasonable strategy of playing the game is considered illegal.
In other words - you are welcome to play if you are bad at it, but once you get good you are considered "fraud"
It's slightly odd to set rules that define what you can and can't do within your own mind, but it's not out of bounds, just hard to correctly enforce. Lucky for casinos, they don't care about correctly enforcing, they just care about making money. They're happy to let you count cards badly and lose money, and they're happy to kick out people winning a lot, regardless of whether they are actually breaking any rules.
It's sort of like cheating at playing Marco Polo. Sure, you're capable of opening your eyes when people can't see, but doing so is cheating, and calling out people you suspect of cheating but can't prove can be somewhat common.
Specifically https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2016/08/vv/lottery-cash...
>Based on the documents reviewed by the OIG and the interviews described above, I have concluded that Cash WinFall was a financial success for the Lottery . It generated about $300 million in ticket sales, with nearly $120 million of that going to Lottery operations and the pool of funds distributed to cities and towns. The high -volume bettors were a financial boon to the Lottery, collectively buying roughly $2 million in tickets for a typical roll -down drawing – 40 percent of which the Lottery would keep to redistribute to cities and towns. Cash WinFall was designed to attract a huge influx of betting by distributing a windfall to bettors whenever the jackpot reached $2 million. The emergence of individuals and groups buying large volumes of tickets was legal and financially advantageous to the Lottery . As long as the Lottery announced to the public an impending $2 million jackpot that would likely trigger a roll -down, an ordinary bettor buying a single ticket or any number of tickets was not disadvantaged by high- volume betting. In short, no one’s odds of having a winning ticket were affect ed by high- volume betting. Small bettors enjoyed the same odds as high- volume bettors. When the jackpot hit the roll -down threshold, Cash WinFall became a good bet for everyone, not just the big -time bettors . However, the unique structure of the game created unprecedented enforcement challenges for the Lottery.
This doesn't seem true? He didn't buy all of the tickets in question, he only bought most, and people have been running lottery syndicates under the same logic which buy some or most tickets to ensure winning for centuries. Even Voltaire ran one.
So long as people keep buying in they really haven't lost anything even if the build up turns it into a sure bet. And winning splitting solves the equilibrium as well in a rather market allegorical way - if everyone puts money into a sure bet the returns eventually diminish.
The basic idea is you bet on every possible outcome of a match (win/lose/draw) with different bookies offering different odds that cover each other.
The string of failed top prizes was so big that cummulated prize was so big in the end that buying tickets for all combinations was abt 2/3rds of the top one.
This isn't gaming the system though its brute forcing it. And you are not guaranteed a profit. You bet against other ppl hitting the jackpot. Excluding oneself from the system, what is the chance that after N fails for top prize N+1 will also fail? Earning this way is not so easy as just winning the lottery.
Then the government, that was not happy of paying a percentage of the profits to football teams, introduced loto and prizes plummeted.
Hope Pascal doesn’t read this.
They could spend money to buy every combination but split the jackpot with multiple winners? Am I missing something?
Folks: thats > 25% return on investment. I'm sorry but my sympathies with these investors walked out the door at this point: If you can get 25% ROI, stop looking for more.