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> You would have bet the farm on the undervalued bet on the prediction markets.

This is what's frustrating about sites like 538. They have Biden as an 87% chance to win. A betting site I frequent has Biden's winning odds as -180 (1.556 for Europeans). If they really believe the accuracy of their models, they should literally be betting the farm on a Biden win.


That's not how gambling works. You don't "bet the farm" on a single 87% chance event to win 1.5 farms.


That is how betting works when you hedge.


How are you planning to hedge this?


Uh, bet on the other guy


At most (all?) venues, betting on both guys is worse than not betting on either guy. So this sounds like a bad plan.


The Kelly criterion says you bet 61% of the farm in this situation.


> If they really believe the accuracy of their models, they should literally be betting the farm on a Biden win.

I mean, maybe they are; how would you know? (Though it would seem vaguely improper; not sure about the journalistic ethics take on this but it's at the very least not a great look.) Presumably the money a few 538 employees could bet wouldn't shift the betting markets very much.


Real estate prices are unlikely to drop too much since they're one of the few ways locals can maintain a store of value (if a relatively non-liquid one).


Liquidity is absolutely terrible at the moment and all real estate deals are priced in US dollars (and have been for some time). I'm speculating on that the low liquidity will eventually push the real estate asks down, I mean after all what good is your asking price if no one will ever match it. If not - there will be other buying opportunities.

Sometimes you have to be very patient. The US real estate bubble took ~5 years to fully bottom out, although already in 2009 the prices were very good: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPINSA

Liquid assets already took a serious beating (see the REITs that I pointed out).


In horse racing where the bets are done via parimutuel[1], the challenge is that there's an upper bound on how much you can "invest" in a given wager without changing the odds. This makes it less likely that an expert will seek outside investment unless their model has them betting "wide" (lots of small bets vs. a few large ones).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parimutuel_betting


Not everywhere does Parimutuel - the UK and Ireland for example have basically rejected it despite massive investment into on-course "Tote" systems.


Is there any hope for Together for the Tote?[1] I like to dream there is sometimes.

[1] https://www.togetherforthetote.com


Sorry I should have been more specific. Love your stuff on Twitter by the way.


Any idea if this can support handwriting even with a reduced confidence? Support for non-English languages?


According to the Textract preview sign up form there is the following features:

- Printed text detection

- Handwritten text detection

- Key-Value detection

- Table detection

- Checkbox detection

- Other optical marks (e.g. barcode, QR code)

There's a decent possibility it has handwriting recognition. Not sure about the non-English languages though.


The docs page [1] (subject to change) mentions:

Do you support handwriting? – We do not support handwriting extraction.

[1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/textract/latest/dg/how-it-works-...


Do you have a site/mailing list where we can sign up for alerts regarding launch of the Android app? I'd like to try this, but do not have an iPhone.

Without having tried the app, my biggest complaint with apps such as these is that they recommend recipes/meals (great!) but cannot take into account certain things that I won't eat (tomatoes, most cheeses, low preference for fish). Does Lyle take these things into account when making meal recommendations?


before you sign up and start talking with Lyle we do ask about your preferences where you can say whether you cheese, nuts etc. Tomatoes not at the moment unfortunately but we'll be getting smarter for sure.


> ...Offending the public, whether right or wrong, has consequences. Shkreli is getting a taste of mob justice, or just what he asked for.

Isn't that exactly what the justice system is in place to prevent?


No, it’s what the justice system is in place to formalize.


... in the US, apparently.


Pretty much everywhere, if the justice system doesn’t reflect the population’s desire for mob justice, the people will administer it extrajudicially. The places with low bloodthirst traditionally have strong civic fabrics and low violent crime. If those things change the justice system will adapt or die.


Isn‘t this a chicken and egg problem? If people don‘t get to know court proceedings when they happen it doesn‘t give them more outrage and justice porn and calms down the overall atmosphere. To compare, Swiss people generally don‘t care about what happens in courts, they care about the next direct democractic vote (and get riled up about it sometimes), but I consider that at least more at the root of politics and not targeted at individuals.


Then that "justice" system should be overthrow, along with every judge who supports that line of thinking.


The justice system is theoretically supposed to be somewhat isolated from this by limitations on democracy. But we've sort of morphed our way out of half of those limitations and we're almost getting the bad stuff without getting the good. The system is very prone to mass public opinion, but there's hardly anything any one individual can do to actively participate in the system. There used to be a strict upper limit of 40,000 citizens to one elected representative. Now the average is something like 20x that iirc, which is such a large number of people that it isn't really practical for most people to self organize and get their representatives attention on an issue. At the same time, people can get hyped up about what they read in internet tabloids or are told through the media, and politicians will be forced to respond to that.


>At the same time, people can get hyped up about what they read in internet tabloids or are told through the media, and politicians will be forced to respond to that.

This is spot on. That gives a heck of a lot of power to news organizations. That's scary when thinking of the quality and journalistic integrity of many, if not most news organizations. People react much more strongly to what they read/watch/listen to on the news. If the news can get them hyped up on a topic (opioid crises is the latest) then the politicians react, typically just enough to get the news off their back. We're left with ham-fisted solutions that make the problem worse. x30 years.


I‘d say it gives a heck of a lot of power to influential Twitter users, the press just seems to react to them nowadays.


Yes, social media definitely plays a huge role here. At the same time, the average person has next to no power at all. They have virtually no influence on mass opinion, little chances of having any influence on it, and even if they could, mass opinion typically doesn't have much influence on public policy unless its of the 'Manufactured Consent' variety. Perhaps we should be talking less about Russian Twitter bots 'hacking' our democracy and more about the fact that our democracy was barely working long before the 2016 election.


Yes, it doesn't help that most of the news is incredibly lazy and very easy to manipulate.


Criminal punishment in a republic [0] is exactly the institutionalization of the idea that offending the public has consequences. Hence, in the US, the popular styling of criminal cases as “The people vs. defendant”.

[0] a “republic” in the sense of a regime where government is notionally an institution for the interest of the public rather than a private property interest of a ruler or distinct ruling class; in non-republics, the non-public “owners” are the persons of whose offense consequences are institutionalized by the criminal justice system.


It's breaking the laws of the country who are indirectly created by the "public," it has nothing to do with mob mentality. We are a nation of laws. In fact, republics are a safeguard against mob mentality which can happen in direct democracy.

Until being offensive is illegal, it should hold no bearing in a just trial. Fortunately, we have the first amendment, which makes being an obnoxious asshole in and of itself perfectly legal.


Wouldn't a more complete explanation mention constitution or code of laws or some such as well? Maybe some ex post Latin?


> Wouldn't a more complete explanation mention constitution or code of laws or some such as well?

Constitutions and codes of laws in a republic are intermediate tools to the effect discussed.

> Maybe some ex post Latin?

You mean, more than “republic” is ex post Latin?


Sounds like the author isn't familiar with the history of Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq.


You mean places that all prove that weapons mean fuck-all compared to actual deep and lasting social change in fighting corrupt governments and belief systems?

The only way to actually defend yourself against a corrupt government is to change hearts and minds.


I was merely disproving the fact that a motivated population with rifles can't fight and (in the case of Vietnam) defeat the world's largest military. The jury is still out on Iraq/Afghanistan.


DoE handles the nuclear arsenal. Treasury contains the Secret Service.


The top 3 safest states are all constitutional carry states.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/slideshows/the-10-sa...


From what I can tell, looking at Wikipedia:

Five states with lowest rates of gun death: Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_death_rates_in_the_Uni...)

States with constitutional carry: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho (residents only), Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota (residents only; concealed carry only), Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry#U.S._juri...)


Except if you use the metric of murder or violent crime instead of gun deaths you find that there its much more complicated

Vermont = lots of guns and safe

Louisiana = lots of guns and unsafe

Hawaii = not so many guns and safe

Illinois = not so many guns and unsafe...


And more cars = more car accidents and more multi-story homes = more people falling down the stairs. As a society, we're concerned with overall safety and reducing overall violence and crime metrics.


While an interesting metric, a sample size of 3 (states) seems insanely low to draw cause between guns carry == safety. There has to be more meaningful ways to glean that data, no?

May as well tie it into most popular music if we're using sample sizes that small.



I wasn't making the argument that more people carrying == safety. I was countering the argument that more people carrying inherently means less safety.


But the argument you responded to was that more guns were related to more gun deaths. You might as well have countered any tangential "argument".


Fair enough, apologies for my confusion :)


Seems that Australia has a higher suicide rate than Switzerland. Didn't Australia ban guns?

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/who-findings_switzerland-report...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/09/27/australias-suici...


Not entirely, but they made owning them very tricky unless you're a farmer AFAICT. City dwellers can own handguns, but they must stay locked up at the gun club when not in use at the gun club.


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