On lotteries and gambling

I just answered the phone and spoke for a short while with a telemarketer. This time, I was apparently listed in the "previous customer"-section of "Kombilotteriet" - a swedish lottery. The (rather nice) lady on the phone spent several minutes explaining the current lottery setup, how buying one ticket (at SEK 200) would not obligate me automatically to buying more later et.c. et.c. up until the point where she was done with the spiel and wanted my input.

My input being "I have studied game theory enough to know that I will be playing a losing game against any company that has sane business practices." And I am not interested in lotteries for the excitement either - which pretty much clears out any and all reasons for participating.

Now, how can I be this certain that I won't be interested in gambling? I'm using a gauge from game theory called "Expected return". The expected return is the value measurement of an event (in this case the amount of money - or the amount of happiness due to the excitement - but since I don't care for exciting lotteries, I look at the money) times the probability that that money will return to me. At this point I have a 100% probability of losing the ticket price, and there will be some lottery-specific set of probabilities for various returns.

If the sum of winning*probability exceeds the ticket price, it would be worthwhile to actually participate in the game. I could in the long run expect to gain money on participating. However: positive expected return for me means negative expected return for the lottery company. Thus any lottery which would attract my interest would also automatically stop running since it's rather impossible to sanely run a business on the premise "Let's give other people our money!"

If I were to play, I would be playing roulette - which with the mean loss of 1/37 of everything I gamble is one of the very most fair games available. (With US roulette, this figure is 2/38) Swedish state lotteries with about 60% losses are things I avoid like the plague. (which DOESN'T mean I won't play if I get the ticket for free - that would mean I can expect 40% of the ticket price back! :)

On Suicide Attacks

Dagens Nyheter reports (in Swedish) about research by Robert Pape into the nature of suicide bombings. Robert Pape talks about it himself to American Conservative. The subject is Pape's book Dying to Win - The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism from Random House.

He has spent two years collecting and analyzing the set of all suicide bombings since 1982. Most frequent bombers where the Tamil Tigers - a marxist group opposing Hindu occupants. More notable groups include the Sikh in Punjab, and the various components of the Kashmir conflict. Only half of the bombings had connections to islamic fundamentalism - and only 43% were done by religious people.

Once established that religion is not a high motivating factor behind the bombings, Pape goes on to point out what all do have in common: All the bombings were done by members of groups suffering under occupation. Palestinians in Israel. Hizbollah - after Israel entered Lebanon in 1982. The Tamil - after the Sri Lankian government placed 160 000 settlers. The Sikh after India positioned forces in Punjab. Al Qaida - after the US placed a significant military presence in Saudi Arabia. Iraq hadn't seen suicide bombers before the "liberation".