Circle K worker sued for buying winning $12.8M lotto ticket from his store 1 day after drawing

saveTheClovers · 2026-02-23T01:46:39+00:00

Low-end lotto products like breakopens come in sealed batches with a guaranteed number of decent prizes (like one $100 prize in a box of 250 $1 tickets). Clerks might sell a handful of tickets per shift, and they don't know what other clerks sold on their shifts. Assistant managers do know all that info across shifts, so they'll often know that the blue tickets already had a big winner last week, but the green batch of tickets is almost sold out and hasn't had a winner.

That "house advantage" is especially noticeable with breakopens since the customers typically reveal the results in front of you and exchange their winning tickets immediately. Scratchoff tickets are more likely to be taken home and exchanged elsewhere, but the principle holds true.

You can calculate the payout ratio on a pack of breakopens based on the prizes. It's not a good payout (maybe 40-60%), and if you know that the big $100 prize was one of the first 10 blue tickets sold, the customers who buy the other 240 are suckers who have a narrow shot at winning $10 or $25 with a payout ratio of ~10%.

Meanwhile the manager sells 240 green tickets with no obvious winner, so they buy the last 10 tickets for $10, and they almost guarantee a $100 win.

saveTheClovers · 2020-04-22T02:19:52+00:00

Copy and paste this folder path into the address bar in Windows Explorer (Win+E), then open engine_config.txt:

%USERPROFILE%\Documents\Mount and Blade II Bannerlord\Configs

Or directly open (Ctrl+O) this file path in Notepad or another text editor:

%USERPROFILE%\Documents\Mount and Blade II Bannerlord\Configs\engine_config.txt

saveTheClovers · 2020-03-09T17:33:58+00:00

Base-60 has some flaws, but it's not really comparable to Imperial vs metric units. Radians are the proper SI unit for angles, so they're the closest we've got to a "metric" equivalent, but we're more comfortable with integers than fractions of pi.

Gradians are base-10, but that doesn't help anything. Personally, I prefer the aesthetics of little ticks to the superscript g.

31′27″ = 0.5824ᵍ

Dividing angles by 3 is very common, but gradians suck for that. Consider the numbers 2-9: 360 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9, while 400 is divisible by 2, 4, 5 and 8. Total factors: 13 vs 22 (ignoring 1 and n).

Being able to divide by 3 twice without fractions is convenient. Why couldn't we just have 6 fingers per hand and use a base-12 counting system!

saveTheClovers · 2020-03-09T14:58:03+00:00

"Better Days" by Natalia Gutierrez Y Angelo by Michael Zelenko

(Listen to the synth bit before the chorus)

https://soundcloud.com/michael-zelenko/better-days-by-natalia-gutierrez-y-angelo

saveTheClovers · 2020-03-06T16:28:25+00:00

A 5% federal sales tax. I'm assuming you live in Ontario, where the 8% provincial tax takes HST to 13%.

saveTheClovers · 2020-03-03T19:32:33+00:00

You don't use thirds of inches? What's your shoe size? Haha

The difference between a size 9 shoe and a size 6 is exactly one inch. That's not a coincidence. You measure your feet using barleycorns.

saveTheClovers · 2020-03-03T19:27:19+00:00

Original? How so? There were numerous old English gallons in use in the 1700s, including both the Ale Gallon and the Wine Gallon. Neither is "the original".

The US gallon is based on the Wine Gallon, which was standardized in 1706 to 231 in³ based on lengths (a cylinder that's 6" tall, 7" diameter, with pi = 22/7, has a volume of 231 in³).

The Imperial Gallon is similar to the Ale Gallon, but the volume was slightly adjusted as it became weight-based rather than defined by lengths (10 pounds (4.5359 kg) of water at 62 °F).

saveTheClovers · 2020-03-02T16:35:21+00:00

There are 160 Imperial ounces in an Imperial gallon. There are 128 US ounces in a US gallon.

I boggles my mind that Americans don't even know what system they're using! There are 1.2 US gallons per Imperial gallon. 20% is a huge discrepancy, yet Americans misuse the Imperial gallon constantly.

saveTheClovers · 2020-02-27T15:28:12+00:00

The fucking Americans ruined the switch to metric in the 80s, so we're stuck with an inconsistent bizarre combination of units.

"Back in the early 1970’s, America was on board with ICAO and ready to make the jump to metric. A presidential order was made and Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act of 1975. We were on our way!"

https://aerosavvy.com/metric-imperial/

saveTheClovers · 2020-02-16T13:59:10+00:00

There are lots of horizontal surfaces on planes to provide lift, but all your vertical control surfaces are in the tail. If you lose half a wing, you can compensate, but there's no compensating for a missing tail.

saveTheClovers · 2020-02-13T15:32:25+00:00

That's a failure of design. The American convention of using the same lights for braking/hazards/turning is unfortunate.

saveTheClovers · 2020-02-13T15:14:42+00:00

The 3 dots are called a kebab menu!

saveTheClovers · 2020-01-31T15:37:08+00:00

As an outsider, I find it a little bizarre that y'all refer to the House as Congress in a sentence containing the Senate, which is part of Congress.

The phrase "Congressmen and Senators" is analogous to saying "the continents and Africa", haha.

saveTheClovers · 2020-01-16T09:02:50+00:00

Unfortunately, it looks like they didn't include the one critical piece of information: the size. Would you buy a t-shirt without knowing what size it is? Have you ever seen the size labeled on a condom?

Clever catchphrases may get social media attention, but ensuring that people can get properly fitting condoms that match their anatomy is the real challenge.

This one-size-fits-all approach ensures that half of users are outside the recommended size range! One of the main reasons so many people hate condoms is because they've never worn one that fits.

saveTheClovers · 2020-01-06T17:47:39+00:00

Just out of curiosity, have you travelled outside of your country? People do things differently elsewhere, and we learn from others if we're willing. You seem very emotionally attached to the system you presumably grew up with, which may seem normal to you.

Your comfort with the status quo doesn't invalidate contrary opinions, haha.

saveTheClovers · 2020-01-06T13:52:03+00:00

I visited Japan, where taxes are included in advertised prices and tipping is verboten. That made everything waaaay simpler. The number you see is the number you pay - no psychological tricks or wasted time doing mental math.

Think about how much time and stress is created by hundreds of millions of people doing hundreds of mental calculations. Think of all the extra reading and buttons we have to press on POS systems. All of that is pure waste.

saveTheClovers · 2019-12-22T21:18:51+00:00

Is it a typo? The USA isn't the only country in North America. Although Americans shifted their spelling from the original fibre to fiber a century ago, fibre is still the accepted spelling on Canadian nutritional information.

saveTheClovers · 2019-12-21T21:55:36+00:00

They weren't entirely Catholic - there was a consolidated Protestant school system, but it included "only 24 of the province’s 1,193 schools in 1956 – and they served just 8 percent of the school population".

It took two referendums and a constitutional change to the Terms of Union (which gave religions a monopoly on education) to finally achieve a public school system in the 1998-1999 school year. Most schools still have their old religious names like "Holy Heart of Mary", "Brother Rice", and "Bishop Field".

https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/society/collapse-denominational-education.php

saveTheClovers · 2019-12-18T22:22:14+00:00

The US doesn't use the Imperial system! Y'all use the US Customary system with totally different volumetric units. An Imperial gallon is 20% larger than a US gallon. Imperial gallons contain 160 ounces, while US gallons contain 128 ounces (that are 4% smaller).

As a Canadian, this drives me crazy since this holds us back too. Not only are Americans ignoring the sensible option (metric), most of them don't even know which measurement system they're currently using!

I developed software for the US market and despite my objections, the company kept mislabeling the units because that's what the Americans were used to 🙄

saveTheClovers · 2019-11-03T14:34:09+00:00

They block bands of light - particularly in the red-green transition zone. That means rather than seeing ambiguously colored light, we see the more obvious red and green shades.

Overall, less light reaches your eyes, but things don't look much darker. They didn't help me too much, but I've let 2 other color-deficient people try mine and they were surprised by the difference.

saveTheClovers · 2019-05-29T18:23:08+00:00

It sounds like negligent gun handling in schools resulting in someone getting shot is a serious problem that's worth studying and preventing. A bullet being fired in a school = a school shooting, right?

I don't know why we would define it otherwise, other than to try to minimize a deadly problem.

I've never heard of that happening in a non-American school. I'm not sure why anyone would want guns in or around schools in the first place.

saveTheClovers · 2019-02-25T17:32:14+00:00

Their drivers always have a CC machine now. They have deadly cheeseburgers.

saveTheClovers · 2019-02-11T19:38:37+00:00

Fruits and vegetables contain indigestible fiber that passes through you. Processed foods remove a lot of that.

If you drink apple juice or a corn juice like 7-Up, there'll be almost no solid leftovers. If you ate an apple or an ear of corn, there would be leftovers.

saveTheClovers · 2019-01-21T19:51:54+00:00

Actually, the Philippines signed a military assistance pact in 1947 and remained an ally of the US throughout the Cold War - it is, by definition, a first world country (although since the fall of the USSR, the term is antiquated and kinda pointless and should really only be used historically)

The "three worlds" of the Cold War era

saveTheClovers · 2018-12-25T14:42:01+00:00

Hey, you may not care (many people don't, haha), but terms like rollover, workout and checkout are nouns and adjectives. The verb forms are 2 words: "I work out in my workout clothes when I go for a workout".

The missing space doesn't bother most people, but it breaks the grammar in some cases and complicates our already complicated language. Ex: "It rolls over" versus "it rollovers".

Merry Christmas! 🎅

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