Sunday, July 31, 2011
Mass Lottery’s flawed cash game: Please don’t tell hedge funds
The Lottery’s CashWinFall game is mathematically flawed, allowing big-time bettors to make almost guaranteed money by buying up hundreds of thousands of tickets. Highly trained computer scientists from MIT and Northeastern are also getting involved.
Hmm. What does this sound like? It’s perfectly legal. It relies on little guys taking the hit without any realistic chance of winning. It funnels millions of guaranteed dollars toward inside players. Hmm. What does this sound like? … I know! …
It’s probably only a matter of time before some lowly hedge fund manager gets involved and later brags he discovered a new “investment innovation.” Seriously, what’s the fundamental difference between this and the antics going on on Wall Street every day? …
FYI: Hub Blog watched Charles Ferguson’s “Inside Job” last night. It’s way over the top at some points. At the least, someone should have edited out the porn and hookers accusations. But it was definitely a “devastating expose of the staggering Wall Street swindle,” as one Amazon reviewer puts it.
And it was all done in the name of preserving the “free flow of capital” – the exact same rational now used by those sucking funds out of the Lottery. … Steve Grossman, shut the damn game down. OK? The gig’s over. They’ve effectively cornered the market.
Update -- Nice timing:
The Lottery’s CashWinFall game is mathematically flawed, allowing big-time bettors to make almost guaranteed money by buying up hundreds of thousands of tickets. Highly trained computer scientists from MIT and Northeastern are also getting involved.
Hmm. What does this sound like? It’s perfectly legal. It relies on little guys taking the hit without any realistic chance of winning. It funnels millions of guaranteed dollars toward inside players. Hmm. What does this sound like? … I know! …
It’s probably only a matter of time before some lowly hedge fund manager gets involved and later brags he discovered a new “investment innovation.” Seriously, what’s the fundamental difference between this and the antics going on on Wall Street every day? …
FYI: Hub Blog watched Charles Ferguson’s “Inside Job” last night. It’s way over the top at some points. At the least, someone should have edited out the porn and hookers accusations. But it was definitely a “devastating expose of the staggering Wall Street swindle,” as one Amazon reviewer puts it.
And it was all done in the name of preserving the “free flow of capital” – the exact same rational now used by those sucking funds out of the Lottery. … Steve Grossman, shut the damn game down. OK? The gig’s over. They’ve effectively cornered the market.
Update -- Nice timing:
A Boston reporter turned press agent who helped blow the lid off of America’s original Ponzi scheme nearly a century ago is finally getting recognition for his work more than 40 years after his death. ...
It was 91 years ago this week that McMasters wrote an expose for the old Boston Post newspaper revealing that one of his clients, Hub financier Charles Ponzi, was running a scam.
