> it's much more likely that someone wins the lottery this week (~100% in fact) than that someone gets struck by lightning this week
No it isn’t? Not only are the individual odds of winning the lottery lower than the individual odds of being struck by lightning, but far more people are exposed to lightning on a weekly basis than participate in any given lottery.
You can buy thousands of lottery tickets and it won't meaningfully impact your odds of winning though. You can also go stand outside in a field with a metal rod in your hand during a thunderstorm. "You" isn't really the point, it's the cumulative probabilities that matter. For lotteries this is easy to calculate, for lightning strikes the best you can do is probably looking at past statistics.
Right, but the population of people who buy lottery tickets often do buy more than one lottery ticket, so even if the number of people buying lottery tickets divided by the per ticket chance to win is smaller than the number of people divided by the chance of being hit by lightning, the overall chance of anyone winning the lottery can be higher than the overall chance of anyone getting hit by lightning for the same period.
That’s not true either though - someone eventually always wins the lottery, someone eventually always gets struck by lightning. The latter usually happens before the former.
When a lottery happens, there is always a winner, that's how they work. When there is a lightning, it doesn't always strike a human. The former is (almost) guaranteed to happen, barring something out of the ordinary, while the latter usually doesn't happen, but does happen sometimes.
> When a lottery happens, there is always a winner, that's how they work.
It's possible this is a language and cultural thing, but most (possibly all?) state run lotteries in the United States don't work this way - they simply pick numbers from a pool at random and if no one has selected those exact numbers the prize pool rolls over to the next week. Powerball (afaik the largest US based lottery) works by selecting 5 numbers from a pool of 1-69, and one number from a pool of 1-26, if no one matches all six numbers then the primary prize pool carries into the next drawing. There's no guarantee anyone wins the jackpot on any given week, and often multiple weeks and sometimes months will pass with no winner, ballooning the jackpot further.
I'd more often refer to what you're saying as a "drawing" or a "sweepstakes" where tickets are sold and the winning ticket is selected from the pool of all tickets sold, but that's distinctly different to a "lottery" for me.
No it isn’t? Not only are the individual odds of winning the lottery lower than the individual odds of being struck by lightning, but far more people are exposed to lightning on a weekly basis than participate in any given lottery.