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Comment by osullip | Hacker News Reader

Not worth promoting mathmatical oddities that encourage people to gamble, in my opinion.

Surely you can't be serious. This site promotes social media companies all the time which you could easily argue is a much larger cause of problems in the world than gambling.

£2.00 * 27 is a guarantee to win something, with the most likely outcome a "Free Lucky Dip", or a £2.00 value. This is swaying no one's opinion.

They actually promote the opposite:

> For a more philosophical discussion of the National Lottery and its implementation for supporting charitable causes, we recommend David Runciman’s article in the London Review of Books

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n04/david-runciman/the-p...

crypto enters the chat.

The UK lottery does a lot of good with its funds and should be mentally separated from other betting/gambling firms in my opinion.

If you want to "gamble" its the best option, if you don't you can always wait for the government to inflate your cash away or spend it on Hilton rooms for sailors.

In no universe is the UK lottery good. All lotteries, the UK lottery included, are effectively sucking money out of the poor. It is profoundly, grotesquely regressive.

If the UK wanted to have an ethical, legitimate mechanism for distributing funds, it should levy a progressive tax that raises the same amount of money as the lottery.

Rishi already taxes the tits off anything he can recall after consuming half a tin of Dulux, please no more taxation.

My point isn't that the lottery is good, just that its the clear moral winner in an industry which includes Bet365, William hill, Coral and a million other pretenders.

If you want a small gamble and are adult enough to have financial independence its your best bet. If you don't or.. don't its totally optional.

> My point isn't that the lottery is good, just that its the clear moral winner in an industry which includes Bet365, William hill, Coral and a million other pretenders.

That's like saying burglary is the clear moral winner over murder. While we all would prefer to be burgled than murdered, I think it's fair to say that burglary is very, very bad.

No. It does "good" with about 25% of it's income. A lot of that "good" is stuff that the government or local councils would just fund directly if the Lottery wasn't paying for them. Much better to just give money to your favourite charity directly.

>Much better to just give money to your favourite charity directly.

Checking the (published) 'admin costs' vs actual donated/ used monies is a great way to pick favorites.

I disagree. I'd argue that Wikipedia or the Internet Archive are 100% admin, and that's a good thing. I don't want them spending money paying people to write articles or paying people to add stuff to the archive.

There are a lot of charities in between where some more money on admin (e.g. better training, better organisation) can make the front line workers more effective.

If you want to "gamble" its the best option

The national lottery has an expected return of roughly 50% of your bet. They give about 30% of your bet to charity. So if you gamble £100, you'll end up with £50 in your pocket and £30 donated to charity.

Blackjack on the other hand returns roughly 90% of your bets over time if you play well. So if you donate £40 to charity and take the remaining £60 to a blackjack table you'll end up with more money going to charity and with more money in your pocket.

> take the remaining £60 to a blackjack table

Of course, "take the remaining 60 pounds" is ill-posed; what does that mean, make 60 bets of 1 pound and stop? Play a single 60 pound bet hand? Because that's the conditions under which you could expect to bring 60 and typically leave with ~54.

If you show up with 60 pounds but bet well over 60 cumulatively you're going to end up with much less.

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