FWD: What are the odds?

Funny how simple non-partisan math brings things into perspective:

The odds of winning the Florida lottery are 1 in 22,957,480.

The odds of winning the Powerball is 1 in 175,223,510.

The odds of winning Mega Millions is 1 in 258,890,850.

The odds of a hard drive failing in any given month are roughly one in 36.

The odds of two different drives failing in the same month are roughly one
in 36 squared, or 1 in about 1,300.

The odds of three drives failing in the same month is 36 cubed or 1 in 46,656.

The odds of seven different drives failing in the same month
(like what happened at the IRS when they received a letter asking about
emails targeting conservative and pro Israeli groups) is 37 to the 7th power

or 1 in 78,664,164,096. (that's over 78 Billion to 1)

In other words, the odds are greater that you will win the Florida Lottery 342
times than having those seven IRS hard drives crashing in the same month.

Someone is NOT telling the truth,
and I think we all know who it is.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Except that isn't even remotely true. My drives have crashed 3 times in the last 5 years. Machines break all the time. Whoever cited this has clearly never used a computer.

Not that it matters anyway, because it has been well documented everywhere that the IRS targeting ALL political non-profits, including those using the terms "Occupy" and "Muslim."
It's not their fault there were 15 times more conservative groups who thought they didn't have to pay taxes to elect some dentist to Congress.

gruaud said...

The fake IRS scandal is an attempt by Issa and political black money (the Koch brothers and their ilk) to shine the spotlight away from them and the Citizens United ruling, which made this possible.

The tell is that when Dems proposed rule changes to make the agency (and 501(c)(4)'s) more transparent, the GOP backed away like they were being electrocuted.

Because that would ultimately expose the billionaires trying to buy this country to a wider audience, and we can't have that.

ferschitz said...

What gruaud said...

The only ginned up phoney baloney "scandal" that's even more stupid this is fake IRS "scandal" is Benghazi!!!111!!! Also ginned up by KNOWN CROOK Daryll Issa for the same reasons that he's ginned up the fake IRS nothing "scandal"... black money (no doubt flowing freely into KNOWN CROOK'S Daryll Issa's off-shore bank account), etc.

Can we say: bo-whoa-oh-gus!

Schitzengiggles said...

Whenever the right uses these diversionary tactics to drive attention away from their shenanigans, I can only think:

"Watch the birdie!"

OR

"SQUIRREL!!!!"

Anonymous said...

As someone who works with servers, this "math" is pretty silly. I replace half a dozen hard disks on a good day -- it's just a question of how many you have. I'm guessing the IRS has quite a few.

Also, while searching around, I noticed a blog post containing that part of this forward from someone citing the average life of a drive as 3 years, which is where the "1 in 36" number comes from. That's just plain bad logic.

Of course, there are lots of other factors that could cause lost data, and I don't know how likely this particular scenario would be, but let's try to stick to actual facts, eh?

 
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