Geraldine Williams, a cleaning lady from Massachusetts, has just won $294 million ($117.6m after taxes) by playing MegaMillions. But what about the rest of us? Can we not, too, get our hands on wealth sufficient to misty-eye Mammon?
Luckily, the world is full of just these kinds of opportunities. And while Wall Street, the Hollywood hills, Silicon Valley and the Beltway are bristling with salary, you don’t have to be a bastard, shite, geek or wonk to get rich quick. The FBI have, since 2001, offered a $25m reward for the capture of Osama Bin Laden, topped off by $2m from the Airline Pilots Association and the Air Transport Association. Why steal, sleaze, tinker or rob for a living when you can be working for the unambiguous forces of truth and justice?
Well, the justice market has been working its magic, and yesterday we saw the beginnings of some concrete results. Over to CNN‘s terror expert:
Afghan authorities have arrested three American citizens accused of running a fake prison in Kabul, U.S. State Department and Afghan officials say.
In these ‘fake prisons’, people really were imprisoned, and really interrogated, all on the off chance that, together with a tooth or two, they might spit out an answer to the $27m dollar question. Chalk one up to the rational-actor school of social science. .