Keyboard worrier
Showing posts with label Gambling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gambling. Show all posts

Sunday, June 15, 2008

In the paper shop

6.30 a.m. today. An elderly man is poring over the pink Lottery result printout in the newsagent's. He's had four numbers come up.

"Drinks are on you, then," I say.

"I've spent £35,000 since the Lottery started, and had five back," he says.

He'd come to the shop at six, having forgotten that it opens at half-past. He thinks he's in the early stages of Alzheimer's.

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Here's some lines of comment that could come out of this, but you can easily expand them yourself, I'm sure:

  • Mathematics - the Lottery gives back 45% in prizes, but averaging-out could take forever
  • What is a Government doing, making gambling so easy and readily available (and it started under the Tories)?
  • How much would this man have had, if he'd saved £208 per month since 1994?
  • Now that insurance salesmen have disappeared, what has happened to savings among the C2/D classes? Has financial consumer protection (after the pensions mis-selling compensation and regulation bonanza) indirectly impoverished them and made them more dependent on the State?

I expect you can come up with more, and better.

And then there's drink, from allowing supermarkets to sell it along with your groceries, to 24-hour booze licensing.

Are misguided arguments for liberty being used to enslave people to their weaknesses? Should heavily-capitalised businesses be allowed to batten on those flaws?