when do they draw the powerball

• Y'all probably won't win the Powerball
• But it's OK
• Because it may exist rigged

By now, information technology's probably pretty clear that you are not going to win the gazillion dollar Powerball lottery and be able to fulfill your fantasy of buying Comcast and firing every single customer service person y'all've spent hours speaking to trying to effigy out why your television keeps telling you to call them.

Of course, that hasn't stopped a lot of the media experts from taking to the airwaves to requite advice on what to do if you wake up 1 24-hour interval - say sometime this week subsequently Midweek dark's $one.5 billion drawing - on your way to existence every bit rich as Donald Trump. They all offer sage recommendations on what to do with the coin, mostly smart investments, or hiring a lawyer who, you pray, won't steal one-half of information technology, or making arrangements to keep everybody who wants to glom onto your proficient luck at bay by moving to Costa Rica.

Nor has information technology stopped the media from request people how they would spend the money should they awake to being an instant member of the 1-per centum club.

About of those have been pretty anticipated. Pay off the house. Buy a house. Keep creditors at bay. A lot of people said they would keep working, although with an even more lackadaisical mental attitude than normal.

Powerball winner will withal have to face the fiscal cliff

Nor has information technology stopped experts from telling yous how to brand certain you lot volition win the fortune. Some guy who published a book on how to win the lottery went on Fox News to tell viewers to buy "every lottery ticket yous tin can beget," which is good advice if your cognitive skills are somewhere beneath that of a starfish and ignores the fact that lotteries exploit people's economic insecurity and despair and prey upon those are who to the lowest degree able to afford information technology to accident the grocery coin on Powerball tickets.

Still, after the numbers were drawn, the odds are you'd still have to go to piece of work and y'all'd still owe your soul to the company store.

The reason is simple — the odds are stacked against you.

Or maybe you lot're thinking that the Powerball is rigged and that yous are only a victim of a vast conspiracy that traces its roots to the dawn of civilization. Or something like that.

Of course, you lot're thinking, that couldn't happen. In that location have to exist a lot of safeguards.

But in this era when conspiracy theories are treated with more reverence than facts, information technology seems like a popular view among a lot of people, joining Obama wants to take your guns, the moon landing was faked and Stevie Wonder actually isn't blind in the pantheon of conspiracies that prevent you from living a full and interesting life.

Yes, there are Powerball truthers, people who have taken to social media to inform the world that the existent reason y'all haven't won the lottery has nothing to practice with the steep odds, alike to existence struck by lightning while being in a plane crash and surviving intact, except for that twitch you take from being struck by lightning. Information technology'due south because of dark forces conspiring against you.

One such theory — reported by the website Heavy.com — is that the authorities rigs the Powerball to jack up jackpots and so the IRS can collect more tax money and use that coin to pay off the federal debt, or perhaps, as one theory posited, fund special black-bag operations that include something like taking over abased Walmarts in Texas to seize the state and make Texans finish saying "Y'all."

That theory is perfect in a number of ways. Information technology combines the paranoia that the government has the wherewithal to rig the lottery, with the suspicion that the feds are, in essence, some of kind of evil cabal expressionless assault controlling your thoughts. (I believe it also has something to do with mandatory seat chugalug laws and grazing fees in Wyoming. I could be wrong...)

Less sinister is the theory that the authorities is using the Powerball to stimulate the economy, which makes sense if you really don't think nigh it. It's not clear how spending a few dollars on a lottery ticket stimulates the economic system, other than providing employment for convenience store clerks.

Even so another theory claims that the Powerball is rigged by something called the Illuminati, which is a secret cabal of Masons who have run the world since man was able to stand upright, that is when they aren't dressing upwards similar clowns and riding around in those little cars. Or is that Shriners? They're piece of cake to confuse.

Feeding the theories is the fact that the lottery has been rigged.

In 1980, a guy named Nick Perry, the Pennsylvania Lottery'south journalist, masterminded a scheme to rig the Daily Number, using weighted balls in the machines used to draw the numbers. The drawing resulted in the number half dozen-6-6 and Perry and his cohorts — and perchance Satan himself — cashed in. They were caught — well, Satan wasn't — and Perry wound up doing 2 years in Army camp Hill.

And just recently, the Powerball has been rigged.

It'south a foreign and convoluted story. It began with a winning ticket worth $16.v million being drawn in Texas in December 2022. Subsequently that yr, a man from Canada came forward to claim the prize, equally did a lawyer from New York who claimed to exist representing a trust in Belize.

That kind of raised suspicions and, long story short, resulted in the security managing director for the Powerball's governing body, a man named Edward Tipton, being charged with fraud. Tipton, prosecutors alleged, used self-destructing software he installed on Powerball computers to create the winning ticket. Tipton was convicted on two counts of fraud in July and sentenced to a decade in prison house, the Washington Post reported.

So you may non have won a dump truck full of coin.

But you're yet better off than that "winner."

Mike Argento'southward column appears Mondays and Fridays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints. He can be reached at (717) 771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com.

Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnists/2016/01/12/powerball-rigged/78674912/

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