I follow Dave Ramsey's column online. Today someone asked this question:
Dear Dave, Do you think it would be a good idea to budget a little money each month for playing the lottery? I spent $10 on scratch tickets the other day and won $100. I think it might be a pretty good idea to save $90 and put the other $10 toward more tickets. Edward
I REALLY liked Dave's answer:
Dear Edward, Here's a thought. Just stuff ten bucks down your garbage disposal each month and save the cost of driving to the nearest convenience store.
Really, now, you can't be serious! The lottery is a tax on the poor, and on people who can't do math. I'm not riding a moral high horse. Research shows that people from lower income brackets, folks who can't afford to be throwing their money away on some ridiculous game, spend four times as much on lottery tickets as anyone else. Rich people don't mess with this garbage, because they know the lottery isn't a wealth-building tool. When was the last time you saw a line of BMWs and Mercedes' pulled up to your local convenience store to buy lottery tickets?
The only winners in the lottery game are the students who get scholarships, but in reality they are riding to school on the backs of the poor masses who gamble away their grocery money. Lots of people think winning the lottery will mean life on easy street. The truth, however, is that it rarely works out that way. Did you know that 65 percent of Lotto winners go bankrupt in less than 15 years? Your chances of winning big are about 125,000,000 to 1. You're more likely to be bitten by a snake, or die in a car accident on the way to buy the stupid lottery tickets!
If you've got money to throw around, do something smart with it, like get out of debt! Do you have an emergency fund? Are you investing for your retirement, or your kid's education? If you've done all of this, give it to someone who's hurting, or invest it in your community. Don't waste it on something as dumb as the lottery! - Dave
My default search engine is Google. I rarely use Yahoo, and I cannot remember the last time I used something other than these two. I choose Google because it is the best. Right? Isn't it? I mean, why should I even THINK about changing?
Well, someone with too much time on their hands has created a Search Engine Test. Go to BlindSearch, enter your search parameters and you will be presented with three columns of results. Look at the columns and determine which one you think best matches your query and then click the 'Vote For This Search Engine' button at the top of the page. This will reveal which search engine generated which column. I did two tests, and Google was not the best result for either of them. Maybe I should consider changing...
I have heard about food tasters from "the olden days", but I did not know they still existed. According to this article by the Agence France-Presse the US Secret Service has one that travels with the President.
PARIS (AFP) — A US “taster” tested the food being dished up to President Barack Obama at a dinner in a French restaurant, a waiter said Sunday.
“They have someone who tastes the dishes,” said waiter Gabriel de Carvalho from the “La Fontaine de Mars” restaurant where Obama and his family turned up for dinner on Saturday night.
“It wasn’t very pleasant for the cooks at first, but the person was very nice and was relaxed, so it all went well,” he said on the Itele news channel.
Asked by AFP to comment, the restaurant confirmed the report.
The US Secret Service has always refused to confirm that US presidents travel with a food “taster”, in line with their policy of discretion on all security related issues.
But it is known the Service goes to great lengths to scrutinise the source and the preparation of food served to US presidents whenever they eat out of the White House to ensure it is not tampered with.
The US Census Bureau has been holding a census every decade since 1790. On the map below this data has been used to calculate the mean center of US population. According to the US Census Bureau, the mean center is
“the point at which an imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the US would balance perfectly if weights of identical value were placed on it so that each weight represented the location of one person on the date of the census”.
The map below shows how the mean center has been slowly moving west and south for each census period. Click on the map to see more information.
