nah, this is the random thoughts thread, not really trying to prove anything.
I’m guessing if I have the choice of retiring at 50 and doing part time uber for 10 years as a means to fund a car payment vs putting a years of salary into a car fund, I will stay on the extra year.
It’s a nonsense choice anyway since I currently drive so little that I could go a decade without even buying a car.
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Is she truly down on her luck (like a diagnosis that people aren’t willing to accommodate), or is this a personality/authority/lack of accountability issue?
I suspect the job thing is partly her not showing up on time and partly her car will break down and she won’t have money to fix it so then she can’t get there, likely with a dose of unprofessionalism mixed in.
She does have a physical tremor in her hands and she’s Social Security disabled from a prior job as an administrative assistant… I think a mental nervous issue, but I’m not certain.
She has back pain and medicating it is difficult because her husband would steal her narcotics and sell them so now the docs won’t give her narcotics. But her husband is a super great guy. [/sarcasm]
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in my local district it is $200 per day. it is part of my retirement planning to take some days there. learning the buildings and roles that suit you are important. but it is 7.5 hrs on site. I’ve been a gym teacher, a tech teacher, a k5 teacher, HS math (a few times). middle sch social studies once and that total won’t change.
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Staring at my retirement spreadsheet again. Which means I’m frustrated at work and trying to figure out how long I have to keep doing this. We could pay off the house today and have >$2M, so maybe not that long. We’ll see how the trade wars go.
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i find i obsess on the sheet in certain times of the year. this is one of them as I am between year end work and the comp discussions set for late Feb.
fortunately I am not frustrated at work. unfortunately I am no where near your total and so the projection is between n and N years away with a ton of assumptions that need to come through.
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Things were a bit slow during the last six months of my employment, not anything to do with me. So I spent some time researching early retirement. I mean, I had researched it quite a bit and already told my boss I was likely leaving at the end of March, but I continued educating myself.
You’re making good money, so enjoy that while you can. But retirement could continue to look increasingly better and work increasingly worse as the ability to retire draws closer. Kinda like senioritis. Workitis.
Job dissatisfaction was a big reason, I certainly might have stayed a couple years longer if I enjoyed it more (and I did enjoy it mostly). I was two years into a California filing. I developed a tiering system to improve rating which had a bit of traction but management wanted it peer reviewed and it just didn’t go anywhere. And we had ambitious plans for a countrywide rollout but never had the resources to get things moving very quickly. That would just drag on forever and be repetitive, and maybe it was better that someone else owned that from start to finish.
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I tried driving people on Uber/Lyft here and there during the last quarter of 2023. I didn’t think I made enough $ for all the miles going on my car driving people from A to B, and I was using a Civic.
I would want to be sure about the assumptions of revenue and miles. The barrier to entry is extremely low: a background check, some training stuff that doesn’t take long, information about drivers license and insurance, and State Farm said I needed an inexpensive rider to transport people but nothing to transport things. If you’re curious, sign up and give it a try. If you don’t like what you see after a month you’ll know for sure. Maybe you could find videos of Uber drivers doing simliar things in your area.
Gaming the lottery via bulk-buying tickets in the digital age
Spend $25M in tickets for a $58M payoff.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/us/texas-lottery-system-investigation.html?smid=url-share
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don't look in here
this might be text
2 Texas Lottery Wins Prompt
Investigations and Stir Public
Outrage
Mar 6, 2025 09:19PM
The unusual circumstances surrounding two of the largest Lottery
jackpots in Texas history have touched off a furious debate about
the unorthodox methods used to snag the prizes and have led the
governor and attorney general to announce investigations.
On April 22, 2023, someone won a $95 million Lotto Texas jackpot
by spending $25 million to buy nearly every possible number
combination in the draw. The winner, identified only as a business
entity called Rook TX, of Scotch Plains, N.J., ended up claiming the
lump-sum payment of $57,804,000 before taxes.
Then, on Feb. 17, someone won an $83.5 million Lotto Texas
jackpot by ordering tickets online through Jackpocket, a
third-party app owned by DraftKings. Jackpocket also owned the
store in Austin that printed the winning ticket. It sold board games
in front and had dozens of lottery terminals behind a wall in the
back.
Can you buy millions of lottery combinations?
In early 2023, as the jackpot in Lotto Texas ballooned over months
without a winner, someone figured out a way to almost guarantee
a win, according to Ryan Mindell, executive director of the Texas
Lottery Commission.
In the run-up to the drawing, the person or persons — it is not
clear how many were involved — worked with four retailers in
Texas to order a “significant” number of lottery terminals, enough
to pump out roughly 25 million tickets and cover nearly every
possible number combination, Mr. Mindell said.
Then, in the three days leading up to the drawing, people went to
the stores and entered millions of number combinations using QR
codes that had been loaded onto iPads, Mr. Mindell said. The
Texas Lottery app allows customers to generate QR codes that can
be scanned at participating retailers to generate tickets.
The operation caused a giant spike in sales, with about 27 million
tickets sold in less than 72 hours, compared to about 2 million in a
typical Lotto Texas drawing, Mr. Mindell said.
“I remember waking up that Thursday morning and seeing the
sales numbers and thinking, ‘What the hell is happening?’” he
said.
One of the tickets contained the winning combination —
3−5−18−29−30−52 — for the $95 million jackpot, the
third-largest in Lotto Texas history. Officials have not disclosed
who was behind Rook TX, the entity that claimed the prize. Texas
law allows those who claim Lottery prizes of $1 million or more to
remain anonymous.
The operation — which The Houston Chronicle has helped to
expose through extensive investigative reporting — touched off
outrage at a hearing in the State Senate last month.
“This is probably the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the State
of Texas by any group,” Senator Paul Bettencourt said at the
hearing. “We gave up, probably on a fraudulent win, $57.7
million.”
Mr. Mindell said that the Lottery had taken steps to thwart similar
“bulk-buying” operations by limiting the number of terminals that
retailers could order in a short period and capping the number of
tickets each terminal can print per drawing.
“Generally speaking, if one person had a lot of money and wanted
to buy as many tickets as they wanted, that doesn’t violate the
law,” he said. But he added: “The perception of the fairness of the
game is significantly hurt.”
A quiet store with dozens of lottery terminals.
On Feb. 17, a buyer won an $83.5 million jackpot, also one of the
largest in Lotto Texas history, by using Jackpocket. The buyer was
a Texas customer who had ordered 10 entries for the draw,
spending a total of $20, according to Jackpocket.
The app is one of a number of third-party companies known as
courier services, which allow customers to order online without
physically entering a store.
A day after the win, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick released a video of his
visit to Winners Corner in Austin, the store that had sold the
winning ticket through Jackpocket.
He was not pleased with what he saw: He noted that the store,
which was also owned by Jackpocket, kept a large number of
lottery terminals in the back, hidden from public view. In addition
to lottery tickets, the store appeared to sell mostly board games,
he said.
“We’re not suggesting anything illegal, but this is not the way the
Lottery was designed to operate,” Mr. Patrick said in the video. “It
was designed to operate by someone coming into a store, giving
someone cash and getting a ticket back — not for machines behind
walls, and not from a courier service and a retailer all being
connected.”
The store, a licensed lottery retailer, has for years been the
top-selling lottery retailer in Texas, Mr. Mindell said.
Texas officials say both wins have shaken public confidence
in the Lottery.
On Feb. 24, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas ordered state law
enforcement officials to investigate both wins. “Texans must be
able to trust in our state’s lottery system and know that the lottery
is conducted with integrity and lawfully,” he said.
That same day, the Texas Lottery announced that it was moving to
ban courier services like Jackpocket, and that it would revoke the
license of any lottery retailer that worked with one.
Two days later, Attorney General Ken Paxton announced his own
investigation into what he called “suspicious and potentially illegal
lottery ‘winnings.’”
“Texas citizens deserve far better than bad actors getting rich off
of a lottery system that is open to exploitation, and we will hold
anyone who engages in illegal activity accountable,” he said.
Peter Sullivan, senior vice president of lottery at DraftKings, said
in a statement that Jackpocket would suspend operations in
accordance with Texas Lottery policy. But he noted that the app
had operated in Texas since 2019 with “a proven track record of
compliance and commitment to responsible gaming,” and had
complied with guidance from the Texas Lottery Commission.
He said that the company hoped to work with policymakers to
craft rules that would allow courier services to resume operations.
Jackpocket, he said, had driven over $550 million in lottery ticket
sales in Texas, helping to generate vital revenue for public
education.
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Very confused at them calling it a suspicious fraud by bad actors that they’re investigating (for unstated reasons) and and then later say it wasn’t illegal.
If you make a contract, you honor the contract. If you made a bad contract, admit that you failed at your job. Somebody being clever doesn’t make something inherently illegal.
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But, Texas. 
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agree. that said, the loss of faith among genpop could be real and not what they want.
what they really need to do is adjust the terms/conditions somehow to make it really difficult to execute the “buy every combo” gambit. they can investigate and do that without suggesting the people cheated
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but Trump
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If your lotto design allows “buy every combination” to be a net winning strategy, then your lotto design sucks.
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The buy every ticket crowd are taking a huge risk. There is a very real possibility when jackpots get this big that there will be more than one winner. When this happens you can be a big loser even having a winning ticket.
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Yeah, I think they knowingly accepted the risk of multiple winners. In one case the jackpot was well over double the cost of the tickets so even two winners would result in a positive return, but three would not have.
I think the issue was that they colluded with persons inside the lottery commission to obtain extra machines to make it physically possible to print that many tickets. That collusion is the problem.
By design it was otherwise going to be extremely difficult to actually purchase that many lottery tickets.
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If you pay the people per rat tail they bring in, you encourage them to breed rats.
They could easily make a law that no person may purchase more than 1 ticket per draw, and explicitly ban any apps that allow third parties to purchase for you, disallow others to buy on your behalf. People will still skirt that rule, but it would prevent people who purchase thousands of tickets.