tammyinwv, I've heard of that happening and damaging the rv itself. Its really a scarey thing. The cut in the brakeline on ours was a result of my trying to take out a tree stump (not on purpose) with the motorhome back in December. We think it had something to do with the hydraulics failing and something nipped the brakeline. We do check everything before we go on a trip as a rule. We had taken our unit in for an oil change and that's when they discovered the brake and hydraulic problems. We didn't get to go on the trip in January because of the hydraulic jacks going out. No replacements could be found anywhere in the U.S. They were really great jacks, but only made for two years specifically for our brand of motorhome, then the company was sold and they went to a different kind for the new models. We wound up having a complete air leveling system put in. I still say Lou's biscotti and pizzelles were good luck. Lou, I know you're out there, wish you were in here, keep making those luscious treats and know we missed your additions to the forum.

Much as I agree with the foregoing comments about lotteries, I do think there are two circumstances in which they might make sense. The first one is that in some circumstances, $1,000 is more than a thousand times as valuable as $1. Here's a simple hypothetical example. Suppose that you absolutely need to come up with $100,000; if you don't, you will be killed. Suppose further that you can raise $60,000, which isn't enough. Now suppose someone comes along and offers you the following proposition: You toss a coin; if it comes up heads, he gives you $40,000, if it comes up tails, he takes your $60,000. Wouldn't you take it? Because if you don't, you will surely die, but if you do, you have a 50% chance of living. The fact that betting $60,000 against $40,000 on a coin toss is unfair doesn't really matter. Similarly, many people who play lotteries regularly probably figure that the amount of money they spend doesn't matter to them, but winning might make a real change in their lives. Irrespective of whether their math is right, perhaps those decisions aren't as pointless from a psychological viewpoint as they might appear at first. And I'm saying this as someone who doesn't play the lottery. There is a second, rare circumstance in which it makes sense to play the lottery. Some lotteries work by distributing a fixed fraction of the bets to everyone who has bet a particular number. Which means that if you can pick a number that few enough others have picked, the odds are actually in your favor. This technique doesn't work nearly as well when lottery sellers offer to pick random numbers for you--but once upon a time I had a friend who used this technique successfully. At the time, he had access to a lottery that let you pick three digits, and paid off half the proceeds to everyone who had gotten them right. This lottery offered the opportunity to "box" a number if all three digits were different. For example, if you bet 346 and boxed it, you would effectively be placing equal bets on 346, 364, 436, 463, 634, and 643. He reasoned as follows: (1) If you picked two identical digits, you couldn't box the bet, so many people would avoid it. (2) Other people wouldn't realize that you could place a bet with a 0 as the first digit. (3) Anything with 7 or 11 in it would be popular, and hence should be avoided. As a result, he hypothesized that 066 or 088 would be unpopular enough to be worth playing. Sure enough, the first time one of those numbers came up, it paid off enough to justify having played it. But these situations are unusual. In general, I agree that lotteries should be considered an optional tax that one should choose not to pay.

I was a booking agent for 4 years with Cheap Tickets, until they sold us to another company and closed our call center. :0) Coach class tickets start out with a class, a letter. There are generally 5 of those letters and then they sell the next letter.....and it's a few dollars more, then after those 5 are sold the price goes up with the next letter, until you will eventually pay almost double for a coach class seat when the plane is almost full. Some airlines charge more for seats next to exits because of the extra leg room. Or more for an aisle or window seat on a plane with 3 on each side and 5 seats in the middle. If a flight isn't filling up an airline might reduce the price. OR.....for instance Quantas will give last minute deals about 3 days before a flight is scheduled to leave. Some airlines discount flights stopping at hubs they own for refueling. Booking with multiple airlines can sometimes same you money if you don't mind the multiple stops. I use "Travel Zoo"....to compare prices. And the program "Side step".

I agree it is highly unlikely. I looked up the law I referenced earlier and found this article: https://www.engadget.com/2016/12/15/president-obama-signs-ticket-bot-bill-into-law/ According to that article it is "illegal to use software to purchase tickets to popular events." and further it is "illegal to resell any tickets than were bought with the help of a ticket bot." However it seems that the law is toothless, requiring states attorneys or the FTC to bring a civil suit against the bot user, which would doubtless require proving, after-the-fact, that a bot was used. If instead the law required effective measures to block bots in the first place, or prohibited re-selling tickets for more than their "face value" irrespective of how they were originally purchased, then the law may have actually been effective.