jmcgready’s misc universe

If you want an alternative to the gadget-laden,
credit card busting holidays of yesteryear, then check this story out.

25 great gifts for $5 or less | Wise Bread

14. Potato Soup in a Jar

This potato soup is a
dried version that lets the recipient create
a home-made lunch at a
moment’s notice by adding boiling water.

You mix all the ingredients

• 1¾ cups instant mashed potatoes,
• 1½ cups dry milk,
• 2 tablespoons instant chicken bouillon, 
• 2 teaspoons dried minced
  onion, and
• 1½ teaspoons of Italian seasoning),

place in a quart jar
(you can buy a canning jar or plastic quart container,
or clean out a
spaghetti sauce jar);
add a bow on the top and a tag that gives
instructions:

“Bone-warming Potato Soup:
Place ½ cup mix in soup bowl
and add 1 cup water.
Stir until smooth.”

Even with the high price of powdered milk,
you can make this soup for approximately $3.50 per gift.

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OK, so it won’t be $150 Million, but it’ll happen more often -
and it will be due to probability theory, not
a tax on the ignorance of probability theory

Creating an artificial windfall generator | Wise Bread

Once they explained it to me, I realized that they were describing an artificial windfall generator. They could have done almost
the same thing by each putting a mark a week into a common fund and
then having a party every year, but that wouldn’t have been as much
fun.

This way the party was different every time–sometimes bigger,
sometimes smaller;
sometimes in the spring, sometimes in the fall;
sometimes one right after another,
other times with a year-long gap.

You could, in fact, do exactly the same thing, with a little discipline.
Create your artificial windfall generator this way:

• Open a bank account
• Every week deposit $1
  (or $10 or $100, depending on the sort of windfall you want)
• Every
  week roll two dice one time.
  If they come up double-sixes, you win!
• Throw a party with the money in the account!
  (Or do whatever it is you
  like to do with a windfall.)

On average, two dice will
come up double-sixes once out of every 36 rolls,
so you’ll be throwing
your party every eight or nine months on average
and you’ll have $36
(or $360, or $3600) to throw it with.
(A bit more than that, actually,
because you get to keep the interest
instead of letting the lottery
agent keep it.)

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