Comment by LatencyKills

My brother left school after ninth grade and struggles financially — he can’t afford basic health insurance, yet he’ll spend $100 on lottery tickets whenever possible.

I understand the utility he’s purchasing: a temporary sense of hope. What concerns me is the implicit misunderstanding of probability. The difference in expected value between purchasing one ticket and fifty is statistically negligible. This isn’t about elitism — it’s simply about recognizing orders of magnitude and the arithmetic reality of vanishingly small odds.