lsiq

That's correct but this not a parimutuel wager, it's fixed odds; so if you take Atlanta at 3 to 1, you will be paid 3 to 1 for Atlanta winning regardless of what other folks bet. In parimutuel your payout would adjust according to the rest of the money wagered until the betting closed. Horse race bets are often parimutuel, but most proposition bets such as these are not.

The books can be wrong, and the betting markets aren't perfect but they can be useful tool to gather what the rough consensus is at any given time.

Wonder why PaddyPower does not have Detroit even on their (long)list: https://www.goo.gl/p55Loa

Also, there's probably already Watsonesque bots out there to ruin the party.

Unrelated to the exploit, am pretty sure he's referring to the questionable anti-competitive practices Intel has engaged in the past decade.

Notably, the exclusivity-kickback agreements they arranged with several PC manufacturers. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/business/intel-eu-antitru...

As well as making their compiler choose the slowest execution path possible once it identifies it's running on an AMD/non-Intel CPU. http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49

They do have a small moat in the short term; the network of drivers, brand recognition they've built up (even w/ the bad press), the large codebase they have by now, and the amount of capital to start such a business from scratch is not insignificant.

However, you are right to bring up autonomous cars. I always thought it amusing that Kalanick et al were so anxious to bet the house on autonomous cars, when in fact, they are the company's greatest existential threat long-term. Once those cars are readily available and street-legal, there's nothing stopping Enterprise or Avis or the automakers themselves from becoming overnight competitors.

And once drivers are taken out of the picture, ride prices will plummet. Margins will also thin because of the likely extreme competitiveness of this market. I would not want to be an Uber investor that's for sure. In theory, the "winner" will be whoever scales the most (i.e. has the most capital to put into their fleet) and has the most effective marketing. In practice, prices may be close enough that people will rent car X because they like brand/model Y better.

If I were on Uber's board, I would advise against trying to win that war which they will lose once/if the automakers get in on it, and instead get creative about how to conquer the market in a more niche way.

Someone is going to have to program self-driving ambulances :)

Patents are state enforced monopoly rights, let's be clear about that.

In what circumstances do we want to have monopolies doled out, even timed ones? Even in the classic image of the sole inventor who does something shrewd but ends up with nothing because he didn't patent it; is it really the best outcome to have this one person get rich while lives are lost and technological progress of society slowed because the monopoly pricing imposed is prohibitive for all but the wealthy?

The best scenario for a patent is as a subsidy for inventions that could not or would not exist without very substantial capital investment. Software methods by and large do not fall in that category.

To some of you who are a bit disenchanted with MtG's cost (and the 90s style online client), as well as Hearthstone's simplicity - I might recommend Hex:Shards of Fate. It's more or less what MtG would be if WoTC were on top of their game. It's far cheaper and you can play in your underwear.

The hypothesis that you would have excess supply is not very well thought out.

Take the train example that he mentioned. He is effectively suggesting that higher margin 2nd class tickets subsidize 3rd class tickets. Companies may be afraid to improve 3rd class, thinking it would eat into their 2nd class and lower profits. But they would very likely just sell more tickets, as their 3rd class was now the best in the business. And provided there were an actual differentiated service in 2nd class, those tickets would still sell. And if the was no difference, they could eliminate 3rd class altogether and sell second class only for greater volume and slightly lower price (or make 2nd class improvements).

Cannibalization is no problemo for business. Some folks at Apple were afraid the iphone would cannibalize ipod sales. Imagine if they actually went with that thinking and sold iphones that didn't play music. And iPods still sell to this day.

Unless the sector has high barrier to entry (e.g. Intel), such practices are very often short sighted. You don't see IBM selling printers anymore.

The gap is large enough that the efficient market argument doesn't hold very much water. A 5k difference should be enough to favor one candidate over another all else equals. If firms are efficient they wouldn't be paying 20k extra for males.

I do think wages are really very much a bottom up thing in that people can collectively raise their wages by simply not accepting lower pay. Putting a (reasonably) high price on your head is not only good for you but for others like you in the labor market. Firms are not really in a great position to keep wages down, the best they can do is make sure nobody knows what anyone else makes.

There is a very common tendency to focus on consumption, in terms of where rich people's money flows. This argument that the rich spend most of their money on ostentatious goods (e.g. fancy cars) or, in the case of this posting, donations to political or even charitable causes. While there is of course some truth to this, it ignores the elephant in the room which is that the rich DON'T spend most of their money. The vast majority of wealth (individual, corporate, and sovereign) is tied up in investments and other liquid or illiquid assets. One of the biggest symptoms of the current malaise in terms of inequality are the abnormally high asset prices globally (and thus lower yields), and most essential, very low inflation. There are huge sums of money in the economy that have been pumped in since 2008, but inflation has not shown up in 7 years largely because velocity of money is down. The concentration of wealth, and possible talk about technological deflation, are both closely tied up in this. The lower classes which tend to spend all their money - and sometimes money they don't even have - contribute disproportionately to velocity, now likely don't collectively have enough money to really drive economic and monetary trends anymore. Especially, if they are burdened by debt repayments which many in this day are.

There is a very good reason computing power is the bottleneck and it is because of how the weather has to be modeled. Weather models simulate the conditions in the cells of a lattice that is overlaid over geographic areas. To improve accuracy, the cells need to be shrunk to smaller sizes as they have been for a long time. However, every time the size of the cells in the lattices are halved you need 8 times the computing power to perform the calculations of the 3D space. Because of Moore's Law, it takes many years for it to make sense for weather centers to upgrade their infrastructure and see significant improvements in their predictions.

It has been a few years since I graduated, but my impression is always that people were in general much more willing/allowed to talk in the A-level more than on any other floor.

Sure the ground floor could get packed but the amount of dBs/person was higher in the A-level, so it would it be louder if it was actually packed as well. This likely also because the A-level has the cubicles in the back that were set up precisely for group work.

In any case, it is misleading for the article to say that converting the A-level to a more collaborative environment is taking away from introverts'. Especially since the A-level is one of the louder rooms in one of the louder libraries.

This is nitpicking but, the A-level (the basement) at Regenstein library at the University of Chicago is not exactly a quiet reading area, it is typically loudest floor in the whole building.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Google search doesn't have the sterling reputation of effectiveness it did 5 years ago. And Yahoo's new deal with Firefox could very well pay dividends.