No one here has mentioned the no-fail, no-lose, sure-fire way to get rich off the lottery: selling lottery tickets.
You make the vast majority of your money on the tickets, but, for fun, you do get a (small) percentage commission of the prize for selling the winning ticket.
I remember reading some years ago about a group of old guys in a Florida retirement home who figured out that the distribution of winning tickets was (at the time) based on area rather than population. They would pool their resources every month and buy up all the tickets in the town and split the winnings, which were always more than their outlay.
But, statistically speaking, still zero.
Everybody knows the one surefire way to win the lottery: only play winning numbers.
Duh.
Flip a coin. if it ends up standing on its edge when it stops spinning, congratulations.
If you buy a ticket after that, your odds are still ZERO, out to about six or seven decimal places.
The guy at work who handles the office Powerball pool upped the entry fee to TWO tickets. I still participated (it’s 4 bucks for crying out loud and I’d hate to find myself alone at the office on Thursday) but I had to point out how silly it is to think buying 40 numbers instead of 20 is going to matter. He didn’t care-- I guess I didn’t either really.
Remind me not to be in line behind you at the 7-11.
This is not true. You might find a lottery ticket on the ground–there are a lot of them out there, after all, and that could be the winner. The odds of finding a lottery ticket are small–say, like 1/10000 in a given week. But those odds are WAAAAAY better than the odds of winning Powerball and can be roundly ignored.
That’s the thing with Powerball. The odds against winning are so astronomically huge that actually buying tickets doesn’t significantly increase your chance of winning.
I…
When I used to sell these stupid money burners, I once knew this guy who came in on the regular to buy tickets. I liked him and I knew he didn’t really have the money to throw away. So after telling him the odds, he still wasn’t convinced. Finally I said, “I bet you $5 you won’t win. Seriously. If you win any amount even a dollar, I’ll give you five bucks with no complaints.”
“I won’t take that bet?”
“Why not?”
“It’s a sucker’s bet.”
Me:
I bought a single ticket. For the purpose of a) realizing anything over $70k a year doesn’t appreciably increase happiness, and B) how I would send of you mutants a million bucks each with a hand written note saying, “this is tax free!!”
There is no better feeling than to be generous and receive a,“screw you!!” in return.
I may actually be crazy.
…but the excess can be spread over several other people. Hire a couple techies, pay them at the max happiness point, unleash them onto a bunch of interesting problems without the ball-and-chain of profitability requirements.
…could be royal fun, too 
right? that’s the part i don’t understand about the uber rich. a million bucks could pay half a dozen families for years if you didn’t live in SF. for us techies/engineers there needs to be a solid alternative to SF. (as i type this next to the googleplex)
The answer is “Thanks, Obama.”
Given the nature of much of the technology, the answer can be “anywhere and everywhere”. We can even use some of the time for building telepresence rigs. Much of the toys such developed then can be market-tested and found successful (and profit used for more fun and more techies) or found wanting and just published the docs and kept for in-house use; Kickstarter can be used here for gauging the market readiness.
If played well, the seed money could not even need to be consumed at all, in long-term average; the operation can be potentially self-sustaining.
when i win 1.3 billz, you are first on my list 
…just got this in the email…
Wait, you can afford to die? Pfft, look at Mr. Moneybags over here.
