Lottery tickets are some people’s portfolio.

This is another thing I see that makes me think that a lot of poverty is little more than a mentality.

There’s this convenience store I drop into every so often that’s not really in the nicest neighborhood. I really don’t like going in there because it takes forever and a day to get to the register because there are always a number of people there buying lottery tickets.

Like I said yesterday, when I go to sea I buy 4 tickets, one for each drawing of my 2 week tour. It’s somewhat of a joke among the guys and we watch the drawing when we’re not too busy and laugh about the imaginary stuff we’re going to do if I hit it big. It’s just cheap entertainment, and life out here can sometimes use a little help.

I don’t have clue one as to what I’d do if I DID win any real money. I think the most I have ever won was three bucks.

One time, though, I became a short-time millionaire. I said that if I won a million bucks, I'd sit on the hatch combing and eat a dish of ice cream and watch the Jersey shore roll on by.

Right after the drawing, one of the guys handed me a dish of ice cream and I sat on the combing and ate it as the Jersey shore passed by.

Close enough.

Still, in poor neighborhoods I see people lined up to get their share of the damned things. It’s crazy. I’ve seen people buy as many as fifty dollars worth for a single drawing.

Fifty bucks will buy a lot of grub, and will make the difference in upgrading living quarters.

Put aside into an investment, it’ll add up. Hell, $20 a week saved is over a grand in the course of a year.

Over the course of ten years, with interest compounded, it’s enough saved to buy a new compact car or a damned good used one.

Yet, they continue to desperately piss the money away on the off chance they’ll hit it big.

It’s not like the lottery people are trying to screw the poor people with false promises. After all, the odds are posted for all to see. These people must KNOW that they are just throwing their money away, yet they continue to do so.

I guess the excuse some people will make for these people is that they are desperate, and maybe there’s some truth to it, but it strikes me as something a little deeper. I’d just bet some of them are simply looking for an easy way out.

The other thing I often hear about is the poor person that wins millions and is broke a year or two later.
It makes me think that poverty, at least to some, is a mentality of some sort.

Abraham Lincoln once said that most people are about as happy as they want to be.

I’ll bet there’s more than a kernel of truth to that.

I think tomorrow we’ll take a break from poverty and look at wealth.

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My other blog is ‘Of Sailboats and Seeing Eye Cats’

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Let’s look at Bill Gates and a little guy in S. Cal.


There was this guy hanging out in Marina Del Rey that got a bright idea.

Sailboats were not selling very well, and he got the idea of asking a guy that was selling his if he’d be interested in renting it out for a charter business. The owner agreed, so the guy became a partner in a charter business. The guy was responsible for crewing the boat, the owner was responsible for advertising and insurance.

The guy was pretty slick. He trained a couple of guys and helped them get their Coast Guard captain’s licenses and pretty soon he didn’t have to go to work every day, so he approached another boat owner and repeated the process.

In a few years he was partners in several grass roots charter businesses and was in a position where all he really had to do is hang out on the beach, which ain’t a bad deal.

But let’s look a little deeper. Not only had he made money, but he had created wealth.

He had created a number of grass roots businesses.

Because of him, there were a number of people that had jobs that paid fairly well. The employees had all gotten their licenses thus they were marketable. Some of them eventually went on to bigger and better things and were replaced, creating more skilled people.

The little guy had created wealth.

Bill Gates did pretty much the same thing on a bigger scale.

Bill created a product that changed society like nothing I’ve seen in my life. His operating system for computers is without a doubt the most popular system in the world today.

The system has created more businesses and jobs than anything I can think of. Even a two person cleaning company uses the Windows operating system. It’s almost unheard of to find any business that doesn’t have at least one computer behind it.

Even many small businesses have an Information Technology department of some sort.

The amount of people working because of Bill Gates is astounding when you add all of the peripheral jobs that the personal computer has created.

On his way to becoming a gazillionaire, Bill made a lot of people into multi millionaires, more people yet became millionaires, a lot of people got damned good paying jobs, and so on all the way down to the guy that sweeps the floor at Microsoft.

Gates put a lot of people to work and wound up putting a lot of food on a lot of tables, made it possible for a lot of people to pay mortgages and put their kids through school.

The important part here is not that Bill Gates or the guy in Marina Del Rey made a bunch of money, but that they created wealth.

We are better off because of people like this.