Earlier this week, CNN reported that a math professor said not to be tempted to buy all 292 million combinations of Powerball tickets because although the tickets would have only cost $584 million, you would likely have had to share the pool with at least one other winner, making the chance to win the $1.2 billion estimated at the time unprofitable.
CNN also reports that you couldn’t possibly buy every ticket because as at one ticket a second, it would take nine years to buy every combination.
3 Questions That Arise From This Story
- Who fact-checks CNN math stories? If it took nine years to buy every combination, you could buy the winning numbers right after they were announced. Fools.*
- Has CNN never heard of bots? If they can buy every ticket to the Bruce Springsteen concert in 1 second on Ticketmaster, we’re pretty sure hackers can figure out how to buy all the tickets online before their Pizza Pops are done in the 7-Eleven microwave.
- What have you done, Dr. Math? With three actual winners, if you somehow dissuaded Donald Trump from buying a ticket, he would have lost hundreds of millions of dollars of the final $1.6 billion prize. Now that $1.6 billion can be used on non-stop ads explaining how Jeb Bush is “low energy,” which is actually a positive in this EnergyStar conservation era.
*this is not meant to be taken literally, so please don’t in the comments section.**
**that wasn’t meant to be taken literally, either, so please comment in the comments section!
