Not This Time

Over the last few days, there's been a big fuss over the latest big lottery jackpot. It amounted to something like half a billion dollars, if I understand correctly. That's a lot of money, and so it's only natural that some hysteria would develop. I didn't buy a ticket, but then I couldn't have, as California does not have Powerball. I don't think I would have bought a ticket anyway, as it wasn't really on my radar, but I do typically buy one when it gets so big.

Two winners did emerge from the latest drawing, and I gather that one was some family in Maryland. the other is somebody in Arizona, my home state. I don't think that they have been named yet as of this writing, but that hasn't stopped people from claiming to be the winner. That brings me to my point. There's this guy on Facebook who purports to have the winning ticket. He further says that he will give a million dollars to a randomly selected person who shares the photo of him with the ticket.

Do I have to say any more before you reasonably conclude that it must be a hoax? I sure shouldn't, but very smart, ordinarily rational people can be easily taken in. I was instantly skeptical, and took the elementary step of searching the man's name. This turned up other people wondering whether he was a real winner. Commenters to their inquiries observed that real lottery tickets have the numbers in ascending order, which his didn't. They also pointed out that it failed to match the winning ticket from Arizona in other ways, and looked photoshopped.

Maybe I will miss out on some opportunities because I am not trusting enough, and waste time trying to verify incredible opportunities before pouncing on them. Well, I'm prepared to cost myself some successes in order to avoid getting burned. It's fairly pointed out that the cost in this case was merely the effort of sharing the photo, but then that would be neglecting the impact on one's reputation as a credulous, thinking person. That's worth too much to me.