Category Archives: Probability

OK, enough of this argument

Red Derp

Every time I see this, it’s tired. Let’s ignore for the time being the “It happens every time” fish story frosting (i’ve had fast food employees get my orders right THOUSANDS of times, wrong probably less than a percent of that), and look at what this person is actually saying, which is that wages are about what you “deserve.”
 
That’s funny, because I always see this kind of meme put out by right wing folks who tend to believe in capitalism as a first principle. Anyone can tell you that capitalism isn’t about “Deserve” – it’s about supply and demand, and to a lesser degree, the transparency of informatics that allows you to evaluate them.
 
A perceived moral entitlement for the type of work you do? That’s a socialist value. A pure capitalist would expect to be paid based on the market and nothing else. That should cause these people some cognitive dissonance, but doesn’t. 
 

But that’s fodder for another discussion.

Moving on:

 
Look, it’s not a special law for fast food workers! She would get the 15 as well. At least. Since she’s 3.75 over minimum now, the worst deal she would get from the legislation would be a 40% raise…and most likely her wage would continue to float above minimum wage.
 
If you are struggling to live on 11 an hour, would you rather have a) a 40 percent raise, and likely more or b) The bullshit “fake pay” of getting to tell yourself you make more than a guy at mcdonalds? You can’t spend ego. You can spend money. So I would think a capitalist would stand in solidarity.
 
She’s literally so invested in a negative narrative of how wronged she is that she’ll turn down money for position in a hierarchy.
 
I mean, think about that. Really think about that. It is literally more important to this person to be perceived as better and to pull down on other workers than it is to actually make more money and have a better life. She doesn’t want 15 an hour if someone else gets it, too?! Her status as “above minimum wage” is more important too her than money that she can fold up and use?
 
And honestly, the problem with our medical infrastructure is we let CNAs, EMTs, etc be exploited for having a calling. They don’t make enough money, but it would be easier to change that if they weren’t all deeply anti-union and anti-wage protection because of red state politics that see them vote for the interests of their bosses over themselves.
 
It’s very simple: If a company can’t afford to pay a full time employee a rate conversant with food and rent, than they can’t really afford to have an employee.
 
I know the last time I rode in an ambulance, they charged me PLENTY – I can’t really fathom that that 1200 dollar, half hour ambulance ride would need to cost much more if the two guys operating it made $7.5 each for that time instead of 5.50, but I know the extra few hundred a week would be huge for them at home. Of all the money I paid for that ambulance ride, I’d be THRILLED to have just handed the EMTs 20 out of my pocket, on the spot, hell, if they got the whole 1200, I’d feel better about paying it.
 

When a McDonald’s employee is on WIC and living in subsidized housing, I am paying their wages FOR mcdonalds, in order to maintain the illusion of a cheaper hamburger. Screw that. McDonalds can raise their prices and the people who eat there, the customer, can pay for the employee.

That’s not even socialism! That’s GETTING RID of socialism. That’s telling a capitalist to pay his own way.

That’s putting the cost where it should be. 

 
It’s time to drop this model of both insisting people “need” to work to be virtuous, and insisting the bottom tier of work exist as a social cattleprod and punishment. If work is virtuous, than work should be virtuous and not a shameful punishment. 

Yes, Virginia, the wall is bullshit.

Isn’t it weird that if walls are a good idea, literally no country for 2000ish years has ever walled their whole border?
 
That sort of sends up a red flag to me.
 
 
Trump says the wall will cost 8 billion.
 
The GAO’s actual accounting for the cost to build the existing fence is about 2.9 million a mile. The 670 miles of existing fence are in areas serviced by roads. The un-serviced outliers trump wants to wall could cost as much as 5 times that a mile. For fencing.
 
Now, as an east coast contractor, thriving in private industry and all, maybe Donald feels that underbidding and running over is SOP but I think just on the numbers, the wall stinks like boondoggle.
 
the washington post talked to an estimator who put it at more like 25 billion to build, not counting the cost to design, to acquire or condemn private land (which any real conservative would be fighting), and then surveil, maintain, arm and staff it upon completion.
 
Here, an engineer goes into detail about the practicalities of walling the border:
 
http://www.nationalmemo.com/an-engineer-explains-why-trumps-wall-is-so-implausible/
 
Trump himself compared it favorably to the Great Wall, seemingly ignorant of the schoolboy history that the great wall took 4 centuries of slave labor in a monarchy with near total taxation.
 
It was literally more practical for the Chinese to wait for the mongol empire to crumble on its own than to count on a complete great wall, which ultimately failed totally at its purpose of protecting china’s western border, *in a time before airplanes, explosives, and heavy equipment*

This issue – this conversation – is actually 100 percent not about civil engineering or economics for trump and his supporters. It is nothing more or less than a method of signalling virtue and searching for it in others:

“Will you believe dumb things even if impractical?”
“Yes, I will!”
“Great, take a pamphlet. Follow me on twitter”

Tartuffe Nation

I try to only “get political” about twice a year, but Dan Savage made a great point the other day: The far right has made being christian about gay rights, because it’s easy grace if you’re straight. Not stealing, not being greedy, not hurting people you love – those require ACTUAL good behavior from american Christians. being against gays costs them nothing, so it’s the perfect spirituality for a materialistic world. We’re tearing ourselves apart and ignoring matters that are truly the within the scope of what government should address for a cheap, faux-christian lifehack from neo-conservatives like Falwell, who live in mansions Christ would have given to beggars.

That’s why they’re comfortable pushing for laws against gay marriage but not, say, letting your neighbor starve or adultery… or worshiping graven idols, of which surely the bull and bear of wall street, the things to and for whom most Americans, this one included, spend most of our days worshiping and toiling, surely are two of the greatest.

Fiscal Crisis For Degens

Risk is really weird and sometimes counter-intuitive. Someone the other day opined to me that the individual borrowers were most at fault for the recent financial meltdown. I had to sigh, because that’s incorrect

Credit-default swaps were/are a really weird thing. Explaining it, holding in your brain, is kind of like something like the monty haul problem.

But, and I use the term basically loosely, basically the issue was confusing size and complexity with redundancy. Sometimes a system with more moving parts makes a risk more likely, not less.

For example, if you are trying to roll an 12 or 2 before you roll a 7, and you’re doing it on a twelve sided die, the odds are in your favor, if you’re doing it on two six-sided dice, the odds swing MASSIVELY to the house. Like not just a little, a lot. you go from 2/12 vs 1/12 to 2/36 vs 6/36 – you’ve gone from a clear favorite to a giant dog even though the problems look the same. I mean, hell, on 2d6 you can’t even get a one, right? So intuitively, two dice might seem better.

Well, a CDS is like that. It was presented (and for a time actually WAS) a way to insure against risk, but when they were over-bundled and the bundles re-bundled, a situation started piling up where the actual odds and actual ramifications of a problematic default were not in keeping with what people saw when they looked at it.

Essentially, to use another clumsy gambling analogy, imagine a situation where you have two roulette wheels next to each other. They’re doing a promotion where if you bet the table max of 100, you’re allowed to make a bet on one table on a color that pays 102 dollars on a 100 dollar bet, unless both wheels hit 0 or 00 on the same spin. otherwise, 0 is treated as black and 00 is treated as red. That would be the best felt bet in the casino – you as the player would make 1 a spin (actually two dollars every other but yadda yadda yadda), and lose 100 every 256 spins, for a true profit of roughly .60 a spin (255-100)/256) – that’s a better bet than anything else in the casino by far.

Now imagine they offer you the ability to bet 10 times as much, but only if they are allowed to add 2 more wheels and the 0s only kill if three of them hit…still seems like a good bet, so you do it.

And they offer to do it again, but this time it’s 100 times and they add 16 wheels, and four of them have to hit – you’re making money like a motherfucker now, so you’re going to keep going every time they offer to bump everything. In fact, you borrow from the casino – leveraging – to let you put even more in play on this sure-thing “investment” and you run up millions.

The problem with this progression is the number of wheels is actually adding up faster than you think, so the system is getting failure-prone fast than you’re profiting by your slightly incentivized bets. Somewhere around 128 wheels the odds of a sextuple are well past 50/50 (i’m not doing the math out to find out exactly where), and your 50/50 bet starts paying worse than a regular roulette wheel- your risk ratio is changing in the direction of going bust with each iteration, as your exposure goes up due to debt, while your security goes up dispute the actual risk, because your “portfolio” of chips you’ve won is so big.

Time passes.

You’re now losing more then you’re winning, but still in the green (you have a great track record) So what you do is you agree to swap risk with the player next to you – he hasn’t been playing as long and he only has 16 wheels to watch for zeros on. So you shake hands and say you’ll pool any wins or losses. He’s cool with that because even though you’ve started to lose quite a bit, you’re still sitting on millions of chips from when you were winning, and he wants to dip into that chip tray to try to bust the casino, so he does that (effectively borrowing your credit for his venture at the cost of pooled risk, which is abstract to him because you have so many chips in front of you he feels secure and courted by a powerful business partner), which allows him to pop the size of his play up into what he thinks is the super-profit zone, but is really the risk zone.

The problem is you feel you’ve decreased your risk by those two measures, but you’ve actually increased the risk for BOTH of you and jeopardized the entire casino – because eventually credit makes up so many chips out of their stock, that if you guys go bust and leave, they don’t have enough cash in play when other people cash out. What the system actually won from you is far exceeded by the overall lending risk taken to extract it. The conflation of an exponential growth of risk and investment with a linear addition of further risk protection created a bomb where failure was FAR more likely than the oddsmakers pricing the market (said they) thought.

That’s the crisis. Sort of. Missing a further layer of people who would be side-betting on you to fail and stressing the system even more, and the casino making the decision to itself leverage and pool risk with other casinos doing the same thing, and some casino hosts who were getting paid to bring the players in so they either “just” over marketed the special, or out and out lied about the odds… all badly explained by a poker player who evidently needs to do less poker and more “everything else” because he has started thinking of everything in casino metaphor.

Now here’s a key thing to understand, vis a vis who is “at fault” –

The individual homeowners aren’t the players or the casinos in the scenario – they’re the individual roulette spins.

Their specific risk ratio is only important to the specific ratio of odds on the axis of risk that would cause the perfect storm, because the profiteers trading on risk are going to adjust their market prices to insulate them from the costs of individual defaults.

So one form of law – the push for affordable homes – made the casino put out the 102 dollar bet that was a little unfair to it at the time.

Meanwhile, another form of law- bank purpose deregulation – let investment banks and personal banks commingle funds (the disastrous borrowing to play), while a third set of finance laws allowed the elaborate cloaking of risk as investment.

The law changes happened on different congressional and presidential watches for different reasons, so it’s genuinely hard to point a finger at any one lawmaker and go “this is your fault, you dumb motherfucker” although I can’t lie – the finger probably wavers closest to bush.

And I’m fucking sorry to say, that is the short version.

tl:dr: We should maybe shoot an MBA every once in a while; not all of them, just enough so they don’t get cute.

This Space Reserved for a Pun About Abs

So Mark Wahlberg wants a pardon for working a couple people over 20+ years ago and 2000+ miles from his home. A token, formal pardon for a crime he was convicted of and served his (arguably soft; but he was a young first offender) sentence.  One of them he apparently fucked up pretty bad.

Naturally we are to be outraged. He’s a phony, he’s just trying to get publicity, he’s insincere, he didn’t give every cent he’s ever made to the guys he beat up…

Just to be “that guy” for a minute…How successful are felons a)required to be as part of “rehabilitation” and b) allowed to be before seeking rehabilitated status is insincere?

 
Now that this has happened and become a headline, what exact amount of money or what exact deed would mark him as repentant, but not insincerely so? Is it even possible to take normal moral action once you’re famous? Once you’re rich? if you hit a certain level, will a million given to charity always be interpreted as 360,000 off your taxes? If he were just a moderately successful general contractor now, would it be different?

Would the internet demand the sacrifice of Good Vibrations Earthmoving, LLC, in full, to the gods of the house of correction?

 
Some people we don’t forgive because they can’t get any publicity at all, and some people are unforgivable because they have too much…
 
Sorry, it’s scummy to beat people up, and I never liked the funky bunch, but I just watched gone girl and with the other events of the last two weeks, the intersection of fame, crime, punishment, forgiveness and the media is on my mind.

Phil Ivey Says He Broke No Laws

Phil Ivey has told a GB casino he believes his edge sorting technique was legal. 

Let’s be honest about what a casino is and what advantage play is:

Casinos are essentially giant, sessile living things that filter feed like whales or coral. As you pass through them, they filter your money out, using various market ploys and chemical agents to make the process as fast as possible.

Advantage players are people who notice something about the game and then use it to their advantage.

They don’t manipulate the gaming hardware

They don’t break the written rules of the game

They just don’t obey “unwritten” rules that say you should play blackjack or baccarat or whatever worse than you could.

If you don’t want advantage play, don’t spread workable games, period.

 

Can the GOP even tie their shoes?

http://townhall.com/columnists/michelleminton/2014/08/19/untitled-n1880598/page/full

When I think about the number of these senators that no doubt play poker personally I

a) hate them all for hypocrites

b) Really wanna get in that game. Always wanted my own predator drone.

This is the party of “small government” “freedom” and “state’s rights” here folks.

What douchespigots.

You wanta keep red snapper or go for what’s in the box?

The Monty Hall problem is one of the most consistently counter-intuitive examples presented in game theory. It has stumped doctors, scientists, readers of Marilyn Vos-Savant, and countless students over the years.

The problem hinges on completeness of information.

The confusion happens because we are asked to arrive at the probability of something, and then offered a chance to revise our choice, with better information – but that information is presented in a counter-intuitive way.