As of this writing, the MegaMillions jackpot sits at over half a billion dollars — the biggest lottery jackpot, ever. The chances of winning it are something like 1 in 170 million. Those are the same chances you have of being randomly\u00a0singled out from roughly half the population of the United States. (Maybe I shouldn’t have said that so close to April 15.) Winning means you’d instantly be richer than Mitt Romney.<\/p>\n
Residents of certain states are statistically even less<\/em> likely to win based on historical payouts. California is one of those states, and California is where I live. Statistically speaking,\u00a0I have the same chance of winning by\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>playing as I do by playing. Think on that for a moment.<\/p>\n In the meantime, I’ve laid a bet that I’ve got a much, much greater chance of winning. I’d probably put my chances at something around 1 in 300. That puts me firmly in “dark horse” territory. Not bad. But if \u00a0the oddsmakers who determine such things ever figure out that I may not deserve to win, I’m sunk.<\/p>\n Strange game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As of this writing, the MegaMillions jackpot sits at over half a billion dollars — the biggest lottery jackpot, ever. The chances of winning it are something like 1 in 170 million. Those are the same chances you have of being randomly\u00a0singled out from roughly half the population of the United States. (Maybe I shouldn’t…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":528,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[45,46],"class_list":["post-525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-words","tag-lottery","tag-mega-millions","span_1_of_3","masonry-entry","col-","loop-entry col clr","cat-4"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.late2theparty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.late2theparty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.late2theparty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.late2theparty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.late2theparty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=525"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.late2theparty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":531,"href":"http:\/\/www.late2theparty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525\/revisions\/531"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.late2theparty.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.late2theparty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.late2theparty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.late2theparty.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}