Lucky three

I am not one of the three very lucky people who shared in the first prize pool of Friday's Mark 6 mega draw. Are you? Apparently the odds of being a winner i.e. to pick all 6 numbers correctly out of 49 possible numbers is 14 million to one. OK, so the odds are very low, and it's not remarkable that I didn't win. What's remarkable though is how much the people of Hong Kong wanted to buy into this dream. The newspapers reported that there were long queues at the city's Hong Kong Jockey Club outlets. This draw generated a record turnover of $343 million. In a city of about 7 million, that's a bet of nearly $50 for each and every man, woman and child! Most of the people interviewed before the draw planned to spend their winnings on buying a flat - not a dream holiday? or a Ferrari? or retirement? Perhaps the policy makers should make affordable housing more of a priority, then we can all dream of the finer things in life.