What if you could play the lottery with money in your savings account and even if you didn’t win, you wouldn’t lose any of your original money?

Sounds impossible, right?   I mean — playing the lottery is fun, but everyone knows the entry fee is flushed down the toilet.

Unless….

Freakonomics Radio (a podcast I highly recommend) recently ran a two-part podcast (Part 1 | Part 2) on “No-Lose Lotteries”, otherwise known as Prize-Linked Savings Accounts (PLSes).     I found the concept to be fascinating and intriguing and it left me wondering — man, how can we get it going here?

The essential idea is this: You open a savings account at a bank or credit union or somewhere.     Instead of meager interest payments which, as we all know, are next-to-nothing anyway, the interest is pooled from all other people saving into one lump sum and then, once a month, one person wins the entire pot of interest in a lottery.

If you don’t win, you have your original savings and haven’t lost a dime.   You haven’t gained anything, either, but not-losing in this economy is pretty nice.    And if you are one of the lucky ones that win, it could really change your life for awhile.    Prizes are not gigantic and depend on the number of people saving, but they range from $20,000 to $100,000.     If you’re like me, even a $10,000 windfall would make significant dents in my debt, lifestyle, etc.    $100,000 would be incredible.

PLSes have been around for years in Europe and Africa and other countries but have only recently been able to take a foothold in a few U.S. states, mostly due to the fact that the laws prevent lotteries that are not State-run from existing.    And, as you can imagine, the States are NOT fond of the idea of letting these in.

The podcasts and articles basically sum it up like this:    Americans are crap at saving.    Americans love to gamble in some form or another, mostly on lotteries.   (~$58 billion spent on lottery tickets last year)    Why not combine the two, increase our saving rate, and fulfill our need to dream a little?

Flight travel has the unusual effect of transforming us all from our usual, day-to-day self into something entirely different, unique, and odd.    We all become actors on a very small and controlled stage, hostage to the form of travel that we have chosen and bound by the innumerable rules that revolve around it.

The airport walk:  We all adopt a certain pose, a particular swagger, especially once we have gone through the pains of the security checkpoint.    Before, we are mere citizens, lined up like sheep to the slaughter in the queue, downtrodden and dejected.   We are one of the “nots”, on the outside, the unprivileged.

After passing through the crucible that is the screening and pat-down (sighing greatly if we are one of the lucky ones to pass the requirements without a full cavity groping), we change – we become one of the elite, someone with an agenda, a place to be, a flight to catch.   We’ve endured the lash, conquered the mountain, and now we have a 2:34 to LGA to handle.

Even that phrase – “a flight to catch” – makes us all sound like athletes, as if we had to complete a rigorous triathlon and, with crossbow and camouflage, had to track down and bag the wily Boeing in its natural habitat (feeding ever so gently on Jet-A1);  a successful hunt resulting in the hours-long privilege of sitting on our ass in a very expensive, fart-soaked chair in a high-speed tin can.

So we adopt this into our attitude; we have, of course, chucked out gregarious amounts of cash to be here, we have a schedule, we’re being modern and self-reliant, following signs and rules and boarding only by zone, and generally rubbing noses with some High Tech Shit™.

We cop this all around the airport itself, navigating between people in the concourse with barely a nod or a change in facial expression, but carrying it over to the plane itself.  We regard each other gingerly, as if to say, “I have to SIT next to you, but I don’t have to necessarily ACKNOWLEDGE you.”   Nevermind the fact that while you are on a transcontinental flight and you might be thigh-to-sticky-thigh with a total stranger for 8, 10, 15 hours – a position that would normally result in several fruity drinks and music in going untz-untz-untz to achieve —  introductions are right out.

Few other places generate so vast of a cross-section of a fake humanity in such a small space, and yet it is here – day in, day out, in cities all over the world, we do our little dance next to but not with each other, just to get to a new place for little while.    (Assuming no delays.)

Now, if you don’t mind, dear regular citizens – I have a flight to catch.

This week’s Indie Ink Writing Challenge comes from Head Ant (on Twitter @headant), who strikes a ringing chord with this philosophical prod:

Cogito ergo sum.  “I think, therefore I am.” When I was six, I used to think about what it would be like if there was no world.  Consider for a moment that we are only in the imagination and that our world does not exist.  What is the universe really like? Is there a universe at all?

In thoughtful response:

In Your Wildest Dreams

She was surprised that she hadn’t seen it before, really; the signs were all there, people just seemed to conveniently ignore them all their lives, going on as if nothing was the matter, as if things were supposed to be orderly and expected and logical. Logic — she snorted — the mere word sounded foreign to her now.

Sitting there in the dark she knew exactly how it all worked at this point and yet couldn’t fathom exactly what to do about it.    Having this sort of transformative power over the world gave her the ability to do an infinite amount of good — or bad.    This was the problem with absolute power; it tended to get muddled when it came to ethics.

“A drink, madame?” said a stately butler at her elbow, suddenly.    She looked up, bemused.

“Where did you come from?” she asked with a curious tone in her voice.

He looked incredulous.    “Madame clearly feels ill, or she would have remembered that she hired me last year to look over her estate.”

Always logical.    Everything that she thought of to happen always came with a causal, logical reason behind it.    Truth was, she just wanted a drink and, being alone in the house, getting out of the chair would be required.    Instead, her life now consisted of a rather proper-looking French butler standing at her side.   Go figure that he would be French.

She waved him off.    If she thought about it right, he would be gone by morning, complete with yet another logical explanation as to why he was no longer there.   She wondered — would it be because he was fired, or she couldn’t pay him, or because he had a family emergency?    Sometimes the curiosity was worth the sad emptiness of it all.

But the sense of loss remained; she could barely shake the feeling of worthlessness, of meaningless. Did the life lived according to one’s imagination count as a life at all?    When all that you desired — and thought, wished, imagined, and dreamed — came true in one form or another, what was the point?

Anything.    That was the problem — without the accomplishment factor, she had nothing to struggle for.    She had already won the lottery, of course; trips to exotic places around the world, lovers of all types and scents and sweaty nights in Morocco, drinks by the hundreds in small island clubs that resulted in no hangovers due to some factor or another.    She had really lived it up those first few years.

Now….well.     It was all a bit old.    Despair had gripped her heart so tight that sometimes at night she could barely stand to breathe despite the cool air that drifted through her hut each evening.   There was nothing — nothing — that made this seem real.

As she drifted off to sleep, she wondered what death was like and whether it was anything like this, and she feared for it almost as much as she longed for the end.       Later that evening, as she lay there slumbering, a small part of her heart that had gone years without detection suddenly popped — and she was gone.

Logical.   Everything had a reason.

Today I am the Featured Writer over at Studio 30 Plus (@Studio30Plus), a blogging community for 30+ year olds that I joined awhile back.

Head on over and check out my blog today:    Slightly Twiggy

Thanks for the opportunity, S30P!

Subtitle:    And You Know It

Osama bin Laden was killed yesterday.    Well, thank goodness.   Now the war on terror is over, all our troops are headed home, the economy is already improving by leaps and bounds, and I hear that Republicans and Democrats were buying each other rounds in all bars in D.C. last night.

Oh, wait…..what?   What’s that you say?   Nothing’s changed?

Nor will it.   For all the hoopla and people having their temporary fix on this news story, it will change nothing, and for that reason alone — despite many other, valid reasons — it’s annoying at best to view the revelry and carrying-on by everyone in the USA and elsewhere about this rather minor development in the grand scheme of things.  OBL was marginalized ages ago; he has been no more effective than the boogeyman for years.

Americans, however, are exceptionally good at focusing on the shiny and completely missing the larger picture and, as such, will spend the better part of the next month having this as our top news story, analyzing the attack, the compound, the result, the analysis, the burial at sea, etc. from every possible angle — the people in charge will be on every news story and even Oprah will shed some tears over it, and at the end, Ryan Seacrest will hold a special on E! entitled, “Osama:  From Fame to Infamy, a Tragic Tale” and will fill it with ominous phrases that hang over every commercial break.

Meanwhile, back in reality, our troops will keep on staying exactly where they are and will still be fighting the same, pointless wars that they’ve been involved in for the past 10 years.  The economy will keep on crawling — dazed, bleeding, and drunk — back from the cliff edge.    Jobs will still be scarce.   Homes will be foreclosed upon.   Families will cease to be able to afford healthcare.  Government will continue to bicker and bitch and moan and draw down salaries us proletariats can only dream of.

And best yet?  Terrorism will likely INCREASE as OBL is martyred.    Excellent.

And for those of you who somehow think that this will automatically earn Obama a 2nd term, think again.    Only the politically naive would suggest such a thing, as if one single “success” in a presidency ever gained that sort of clout.    He’s got a hard, hard road ahead of him and I don’t think this necessarily points to him being an effective or worthwhile president — there’s plenty of crap that he’s failed to push or come through on.   This is very, very politically minor.

This is not a patriotic thing that we have done.   Going on the warpath, acting like a global jackass, spending billions of dollars in two needless wars with countries not even involved in the original idea, and hunting down and killing a man is not something to be proud of or jubilant about, unless you’re the sort that gets some sort of sick glee out of watching executions or similar.

This is not to say that I don’t think the man was the scum of the Earth, because I think he was; but at the same time, taking pleasure in this is the wrong attitude to have — it’s terrible that people of his ilk even exist; try to hold yourself higher than his standards and treat this as what it is:  A sobering, unfortunate yet necessary step in an ongoing struggle against the purely evil people of the world who do not think twice when it comes to eliminating anyone they do not agree with.

The adults among us should be quiet, contemplative, and sober; yesterday, a man was killed.   A life was taken.   This should not ever, ever be taken lightly, no matter what the need or justification.

In the end, the result of this event is almost certainly a wash.     Yes, a crazed mastermind of incredible evil has been eliminated from the Earth.  But do not think this ends terrorism, for there will be any number of other people willing to jump up and happily take the role.    Yes, a mission was accomplished, but it won’t send our troops home.    Good on Obama for finally doing what Bush couldn’t, but it won’t save his presidency.   And the rest of us will be no more or less safe at home or abroad than we were before.

Don’t you feel better now?