themeatbridge
@themeatbridge@lemmy.world
- Comment on We wouldn’t need the Epstein files to prove DJT’s guilt if society just trusted women in the first place. 5 hours ago:
Who the fuck said we should remove due process? You understand that when a sexual assault is reported that over 90% are not investigated. “Believe women” is an instruction for the police to begin due process for victims, it’s not like jury instructions. Due process is denied to the victims because police don’t believe women.
Swear to fucking Christ, you’re like those people who act like the BLM movement is saying other lives don’t matter.
- Comment on Oxygen 1 day ago:
The one that gets out of bed last.
- Comment on We wouldn’t need the Epstein files to prove DJT’s guilt if society just trusted women in the first place. 1 day ago:
All the time? Like once a week? Or like every day? Or maybe like roughly every minute of every day of the year?
- Comment on We wouldn’t need the Epstein files to prove DJT’s guilt if society just trusted women in the first place. 1 day ago:
Wait, which do you think happens more often: a false accusation, or an uninvestigated sex crime? Because false allegations happen, but statistically it’s like saying you shouldn’t go to restaurants because occasionally chefs murder people with knives. It’ll probably make the news, but only because it’s so fucking rare.
- Comment on Elder Scrolls Online devs detail “inhumane” Microsoft layoffs as Xbox expects the “carcass of workers” to “keep shipping award-winning games” 3 days ago:
- Comment on Real milk proteins, no cows: Engineered bacteria pave the way for vegan cheese and yogurt 5 days ago:
Casein is the primary protein in milk, and it has a ton of uses. Humans have been consuming animal milks for a very long time, and milk is a key ingredient in a lot of food. Baking, emulsifying, cooking, fermenting, it’s the casein that makes the milk magic.
Some people can be allergic to casein, but far more lack the digestive enzyme to break down lactose. Lactose is what the yeast and bacteria ferment with in cheese and yogurt, but casein is the protein that holds it all together. Conceivably, you could use a different sugar and still get something that sort of resembles cheese and yogurt, but you have a much harder time replacing the casein.
- Comment on Delta Air Lines is using AI to set the maximum price you’re willing to pay 1 week ago:
They used to pay someone to do it.
- Comment on Danny McPhee: A remake of Nanny McPhee starring Danny McBride 1 week ago:
Maybe it’s her son, grown up, and cursed with the same “magic” that makes his visage mirror the attitude of the people under his charge.
And he works as a middle manager at a Walmart.
- Comment on Deserved? Poll inside 1 week ago:
Sorry, I’ve forgotten who you are.
- Comment on Deserved? Poll inside 1 week ago:
She was lounging in his coffee cup like it was a hot tub.
- Comment on Deserved? Poll inside 1 week ago:
You can discuss the events of a story, and the relative morality and social etiquette of the characters in it, even if the whole thing is entirely fiction. Functionally, it makes no difference if it really happened or it didn’t. Sometimes that matters, but here is doesn’t. You don’t know these people, you’ll never meet these people, and there’s no real-world effect of discussing this story (except maybe someone learns not to touch somebody else’s food?).
Fuck it, you could be a bot programmed to complain about people taking shitposts seriously. I could be an AI created to respond to your prompts to try to convince you not to complain about fabricated stories. This entire interaction could be four bots engaged in a learning exercise in a simulated online forum. Or maybe it was all a dream the whole time.
- Comment on The Lottery is state-sanctioned fraud. 1 week ago:
Good point. I’ll amend my rant to reflect that I’m talking about the US lotteries.
- Comment on The Lottery is state-sanctioned fraud. 1 week ago:
Yes, it’s an annuity over 30 years. Currently the jackpot is advertised as $248 million, and the lump sum is advertised as $112 million. You won’t get either of those because of taxes, so your actual take home is less than $70 million. Some might argue that you shouldn’t exclude taxes, but in this case the house is the government. If a casino advertised facorable odds, but then kept some of your winnings, those wouldn’t be the actual odds.
It all sounds like pipe dreaming about more money than anyone needs, but there is a very real fraud. The true value of the jackpot is important because it determines the expected value of a bet. The chances of winning the Powerball jackpot are exceptionally small, but people play because $2 worth of hope is worth it if you get to spend the afternoon imagining what you would name your boat.
To calculate expected value, you take the odds of winning times the value of the win. If a casino offered a coin flip game with pure 50/50 odds, and paid double your bet, then a $1 bet would be worth $2 half the time. Your expected value of that bet would then be $2 x 50% = $1. This would be a perfectly fair game. None of the casino games or sports bets are ever perfectly fair, because the unfairness is where all the profits come from.
Compare it to roulette, where you can bet on red or black, even or odd, and those bets typically pay double. Sounds fair, until you notice that the wheel has 0 and 00 spaces which are neither red nor black, not even or odd. So your odds of winning a bet on red is only 47.37%, so your $1 bet has an expected value of $0.9474.
The difference between your bet and the expected value is called the house edge, and it’s how casinos make money. Over the long run, each dollar bet on red or black, even or odd earns the casino a little more than 5 cents. That 5 cents on each dollar keeps the lights on and the buffet cheap. Gaming regulations limit the house edge on games, and regulators monitor the slot machines to ensure they pay off frequently enough to be close enough to fair. Casinos caught with games that are very unfair are fined, because gamblers don’t make rational decisions and a large house edge is considered predatory. Most of the money comes in through slots because it’s easiest to obscure the house edge and distract gamblers from recognizing how unfair each game is.
Interesting tangent, card counting teams can shift the house edge in blackjack from roughly 2% to -1%, and they managed to make fortunes selling books and making movies about that tiny shift in expected value. Successful teams could earn a few hundred thousand dollars if they are clever and well funded. Card counting is not illegal, but a casino will break your kneecaps if you win because you were counting cards, and we’re still only talking about changing your odds by less than a single percent.
For the lotto, the expected value includes all of the lower prizes, but those payouts are very far from fair. Getting the powerball correct has a 1 in 38 chance of happening, but only pays double your money. None of the lower prizes pay anywhere close to the odds of winning. The expected value on a $2 ticket for the lower prizes is only $0.32, for a ridiculous house edge of 84%. Of course, the jackpot is supposed to be the big draw and pays out the most. And since it’s a progressive jackpot, it gets bigger and bigger until someone wins. Most people wait for big jackpots to buy tickets, because they sort of understand that the expected value of a big jackpot offsets the very low odds of winning.
1 in 292 million. That’s your chance of winning the powerball jackpot.
Now, you might think that a jackpot of $292 million would more or less even the odds, and we’re almost there, right? Certainly we’re in the casino house edge territory.
Except a ticket costs $2. To make the game roughly fair, the jackpot would need to pay $490 million.
Which still sounds like a ridiculous amount of real money, but jackpots get that big pretty often, right? Seems like every few months, when you start seeing it on the news and people are lining up for the big $500 million jackpot tickets.
And this is where the fraud comes in. Because it’s not a $500 million jackpot. It’s an advertised $500 million jackpot. To actually get paid $490 million on a jackpot win, the advertised jackpot would need to be $1.7 billion. It’s only ever gotten that high twice.
And the kicker? The expected value never reaches the full $2! Because guess what? At that level, the number of tickets sold increase the chances of there being multiple winners. Bigger jackpots sell more tickets, and you actually end up with a better chance of splitting the jackpot 2 or 3 ways than you have of winning outright. The house can never lose, because the game has never been even remotely close to fair.
Remember the card counting potential 1% shift in your favor that would get your legs broken at the casino? Advertising annuity payments creates a house edge disparity of more than 350% between what the advertised jackpot and the actual value of the jackpot. That’s 350% more profit just from the fraud. That’s not even the mathematical house edge built into the game. That’s just money they make from lying to people about the size of the jackpot. 350% shift in the advantage, in a game that was already unfair.
- Comment on Why doesn't the Trump administration simply edit the Epstein files and release them? 1 week ago:
They did that, too. They released redacted flight logs and documents that were heavily edited, but it was impossible to remove all references to Trump and various oligarchs they’d like to protect, so they stopped.
- Submitted 1 week ago to rant@lemmy.sdf.org | 6 comments
- Comment on I'm curious. 1 week ago:
You don’t even know how bad it could be.
- Comment on This new SSD will literally self destruct if you push the big red button it comes with — Team Group posts video of data destruction in action 1 week ago:
I always wanted a novelty 5 inch bay device that was release a small wisp of smoke from the front of the pc case. It could be a command, or randomized and it would councide with a BSOD or just a power-off command.
- Comment on Eating would be weird if we didn't enjoy it. 1 week ago:
I know, the first time someone said it, he wasn’t there, and I was like… wait, are we just fucking with Matt? And everyone said no, he is a dad of young kids who does shift work. He drinks a lot of coffee (we all did, the coffee machine was perpetual employee of the month), and he prefers to have it room temperature because he won’t feel it burn his mouth. So any time a pot sat on the burner for more than a few hours, we’d dump it into Matt’s pot and let it cool.
I always wondered if it fucked up his stomach, because I know stale coffee always gives me heartburn, but we weren’t close enough to have those comversations.
- Comment on Eating would be weird if we didn't enjoy it. 1 week ago:
I worked with a guy who had neck surgery that severed the nerves to his taste buds. We worked overnight shifts, and we’d save the old coffee for him because he didn’t mind the flavor of burnt coffee. There was always a pot of fresh coffee brewing and a pot of stale coffee set aside for Matt.
- Comment on Another bad ending for the Road Runner 1 week ago:
Meep meep?
- Comment on Fear of 'being cringe' blamed for lack of dancing on nightclub dance floors 2 weeks ago:
I think businesses are already seeing the effect of a lack of similar action. Young people are going out much less, drinking much less, spending less, and as described in this article, dancing less. There are a ton of other reasons for that (income inequality, inflation, political stressors, health and safety concerns, etc) but social media has had a deleterious effect on the economics of social gatherings.
- Comment on Fear of 'being cringe' blamed for lack of dancing on nightclub dance floors 2 weeks ago:
And don’t forget, that guy experienced a shit ton of bullying before the hive mind decided that he was worth protecting. Most viral video sensations don’t get that second part out of their 15 minutes of fame. They just get the bullying and shame.
- Comment on Fear of 'being cringe' blamed for lack of dancing on nightclub dance floors 2 weeks ago:
When I was young, the phrase “dance like nobody’s watching” became popular. I remember thinking it was true, most of my anxiety about dancing was a fear of being judged by someone else. I’d see other people dance and think that they aren’t doing anything special. They aren’t dancing well or doing crazy moves. They are just jumping around and having a good time. “Jump Around” was like just one of five hit dance songs about jumping. But I resisted because I thought people would think my dancing looked silly. And they’d be right, I was and remain a terrible dancer. I’m awkward, arthritic, and lacking in coordination and rhythm.
But there was no social media. No cell phone cameras. No internet. If someone did get a picture or even a video, it might be months before a small select group of people saw it. Hell, even if your bad dancing somehow made the news, it would still only be seen by the regional viewers watching that evening.
Today, if you’re a bad dancer, you could be filmed without your knowledge or permission, and become a viral sensation for millions of people to see.
If I were young today, there’s no chance in hell I’d be out on the dance floor.
- Comment on Now You Can Buy In-Game DLC And Pay It Off Later 2 weeks ago:
Just what my relaxing escapist hobby needed, debt.
- Comment on Why do so many homes in rural areas have a front yard full of junk? 3 weeks ago:
Someday, that old planter will become a fountain.
- Comment on Why do so many homes in rural areas have a front yard full of junk? 3 weeks ago:
This is a good idea even if you don’t think they will do it. When they don’t do it, you can negotiate money back from the purchase to cover the cost of hiring a junk removal team. Then you can pocket the cash and do it yourself or you can pay someone else to do it.
- Comment on Zelda BotW vs TotK - which one should I buy? 3 weeks ago:
Really? I think I sunk 100 hours into BOTW. I would also go with TOTK all things being equal, but I never felt like BOTW was a tech demo.
- Comment on What are the games you played in your youth that you still play today? 3 weeks ago:
I sunk hours into NetHack, and I still occasionally dive into the dungeons. I also have a NES emulator on my phone, but it’s just not the same. I’ll play Zelda or Metroid for the nostalgia, but it’s not the same as sitting on the couch with friends.
- Comment on If nudity was more widely accepted, tattoos would be more popular. 3 weeks ago:
I’m glad you have data, because I was just thinking that cultural attitudes towards tattoos and nudity don’t seem to be related, but I can’t prove that.
- Comment on New ATHEIST community. 3 weeks ago:
Isn’t that like negative zero?
