You can win the lottery by accident!

Or at least that is what the media keeps plugging even though anyone with a reasonable head on their shoulders knows that the odds are astronomically against you winning anything in the lottery, let alone one of the big prizes.

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Yet no one really worries about dying on their way to get a scratch ticket, do they?

The story goes, or the way that the media is framing this one anyway because I don't believe it ever even happened, is that a man in Ohio was asking a clerk for some particular type of lottery ticket, the clerk made a mistake and gave him the wrong kind, the kind ticket recipient told him to "not worry about it" and the accidental ticket was a winner of $158,000 - which is an oddly specific jackpot amount.

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These stories pop up in the media all the time and the story always takes place is some small po-dunk town that you have never heard of and I wonder if they are even real places half the time.

The winner of these supposed prizes are always fine, upstanding members of society that amazingly seem like an "everyman" and are someone that the average person can feel as though they are "just like me!"

This is by design and since I have zero trust in the media I believe that these stories are not actual events at all and are simply a new form of advertising for the lottery since almost all sorts of actually advertising for gambling of any sort is heavily regulated or outright banned, depending on where you are.

The reality of the situation is that your odds of winning are so terrible that if the person playing had any sort of idea about statistics you would think that nobody would play.

This sensationalized story-telling on the part of the media infuriates me even further because if you or I was doing some sort of fake-ass stories that are actually advertisements we would get a visit from a government official. Yet, when it is the government themselves that do it, they get away with it time and time again.

The media cannot be trusted or as the current internet slogan goes "you don't hate the media enough." It seems as though almost anything we see in the "news" these days is intentionally designed to trick people into believing something that isn't true and the people that are the most likely to fall for this sort of crap are simultaneously the most vulnerable members of society.

I hope you don't play that lottery. It truly is a fool's game. I hope you don't believe the media even more so.