Where is the obfuscation? Most lotteries post the odds right on the main game page. What more do you want?
https://www.calottery.com/draw-games/superlotto-plus#section...
https://www.calottery.com/draw-games/superlotto-plus#section...
For it to be clear how unrealistic the odds are. They're not exactly broadcasting "you're 40 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to win the jackpot", instead their site screams "Millions Could Be Yours!". That is the dishonesty and obfuscation. Millions _could_ be yours, but they are very unlikely to be yours, in fact realistically approaching zero. While advance fee scams say "millions will definitely be yours", with the odds being absolutely zero. But neither are meaningful odds.
Though regardless, my original point wasn't about odds but about the lure and the appeal of both of these things: the potential for getting a lot of money for doing virtually nothing (other than spending a bit of money up front).
Advance fee scams are different because 1) they are telling outright falsehoods and 2) they come cloaked in a broad variety of disguises, which means that a naive web search is not guaranteed to unveil the deception
And "if they don't do that, that's on them"? This is victim blaming in both cases.
To draw another analogy, let's say you don't max out the pretax contributions on your 401k even though you have the means to do so. There are tens of millions of people in this situation right now, losing thousands of dollars in potential retirement savings each year. Are these people victims too? What is the difference between them and people who view lottery tickets as an investment vehicle? In both cases it's a financial loss due to lack of research.
In any case, I suspect that most people who buy lottery tickets are doing it for the entertainment value (the thrill of gambling), in which case dropping $20 on a lottery ticket every week isn't much different than dropping $20 on the movies. It's hard to to call them victims from that standpoint as well.
The problem is that no culture/philosophy has (yet?) even found a clean line.
Ex: How different must the fixed menu picture of the "Burger and Fries combo"--designed to manipulate me into feeling hunger--be from the real food before it's fraud? If I tell you "pink elephants", I have created text that placed an idea into your mind against your will, but is that an offense?
Market capitalism needs truth and transparency to have any chance of optimising delivery of goods/services. These should be preeminent goals of Western Capitalism.
The line is subjective.
I'm not arguing the line isn't subjective.
But, if it's not made with the same ingredients, or for example isn't actually food (as with many marketing images for food), then it's deceptive. I hope you agree?
If it wasn't even made in the restaurant you're in, then I'd agree that is more of a blurred line - if it was made with the same equipment, to the same standards, by the same company, that's reasonable.
I think my point still stands that truth is essential if the mechanism of market forces is to be at all effective.
> But, if it's not made with the same ingredients, or for example isn't actually food (as with many marketing images for food), then it's deceptive. I hope you agree?
The point of the image is to give a preview what you’re about to get. It doesn’t have to be the real thing. If I sell screws online and only have CAD drawings and 3D renders of them, is that deceptive? As long as the product is properly described by the image, it doesn’t matter where it comes from. You could also sell burgers with hand-drawn preview images of them if you wanted to.
I think we agree.
The only thing left is to decide what properly described means -- as is so often the case with such matters. Thanks for your comment and pushback.
On mobile that tab isn't even visible when you load the page, you have to know that it's possible to scroll to the right in the tab bar. Otherwise what you see is the tag line "Imagine Winning $48 Million", details about when drawing happens, and a button that says "claim a prize" with an ecstatic man on a phone.
I will say that the government-sponsored lotteries tend to be less blatantly abusive than casinos, but I'm still very comfortable saying that they do actively work to inflate people's sense of the odds.