I'd imagine scratchers would be almost impossible unless you could somehow get all the tickets from every place they are sold. I'm not into gambling, but I guess it might work if there is X number of prizes/money per roll of tickets.
Even if you can't buy every ticket, there is well-established math about how to optimize profit from a venture with known risk and reward, and the math does not require you to exhaust the statistical universe.
There is clearly a limit on practicality though. Unless you are suggesting someone should sell their 401k and buy Powerball tickets any time the jackpot exceeds the odds of winning simply because it has positive EV?
This has happened. IIRC it was a Stanford statistitian who watched the distribution pattern for winning tickets for a certain scratch off game in Texas. She bought all of that ticket from that particular store and won $10M. I think that was her fourth scratch off win.
> I guess it might work if there is X number of prizes/money per roll of tickets.
In most cases, there is, which is part of why a huge percentage of scratchoff prizes are won by workers at the place that sells them. Most players will scratch and redeem their prizes right in front of you, so if you watch a certain number of scratches occur in a roll and you know the prize structure of the particular card, you can calculate how many non-winning scratches you need to see for the odds to be in your favor.
I looked into this a few years ago and considered starting one of those stands that sells scratchoffs to do just this, but decided a) it wasn't quite lucrative enough to be worth it, and b) I wasn't sure of the ethics of skewing the odds against your customers like this anyway.
> I wasn't sure of the ethics of skewing the odds against your customers like this anyway.
This is interesting because I don’t think anyone would view the store as unethical for continuing to sell tickets from a roll when they know there have already been X winners from that role and therefore customer odds have gone down.
I think the mental peculiarity here only makes sense if you're viewing the two situations in isolation. If the retailer is selling the whole roll to customers and buys none themselves every time, their knowledge of how many winners have been sold is irrelevant because that's exactly how everyone expects the game to work and no one is leveraging insider information against anyone.
The problem with selling out the roll when winning tickets have already been sold only occurs in tandem with the retailer buying remaining tickets when only non-winners have been sold so far. These aren't separable situations.
There's similar for "pack hits" and trading cards, and the regulars learn which hobby shops are reputable and which ones to avoid. Most that remain in business are not scum.
The way scratcher play works is that the states are required to report wins over a certain threshold. So if you keep a keen eye on the state website, it’s possible to determine how many of the big awards (say $10k+), which is where the bulk of the value is. Using that you can estimate what the outstanding prize pool is. You won’t know with any precision… but basically the idea is they look for games that have been on the market a long time, and thus sold through a large portion of their inventory, but where the big prizes are still mostly in play.
They absolutely aren’t trying to buy them all, that would just be a guaranteed loss, since they only return about 40 cents on the dollar.
Old folks, with a fine case of white matter decline. Distracted folks, because the baby just threw up. Sick folks, whose processing power is a bit covided. Young folks doing stupid things, possibly on a video dare.
To quote Chris Rock: if you're old and you die in an accident, you died of old age, not "that specific accident". If your mind's going, and that makes you do something that'll kill you, your mind going is what killed you.
Or we could recognize that lapses of judgement are something every human is capable of and demand such outrageous things that our cookware remains safe at any temperature a reasonable stovetop can produce. Really it shouldn't just be safe but also not break the cookware.
Tell me you haven't had a baby without telling me you haven't had a baby.
You are fucking 10x more aware of bullshit you're doing just to keep baby safe. Probably more like 100x, really. Nothing focusses your mind like having CREATED A HUMAN THAT MUST BE KEPT SAFE AT ALL COST.
I'm confused by your interest in shifting the discussion away from the company that has enough money and lawyers to know better, and back towards anyone but them.
As someone who started going to school for Mechanical Engineering and ended up in Comp Sci, I think your last paragraph is what drew me in. So many different ways to solve the problem at hand.
I've also got a Flexispot (from Amazon, assuming its the same brand) and its been good for a little over a year now. Seems well built and sturdy at any height.
I don't stand a lot, but it is nice if I wake up and my back is sore. Also gives me better adjustability with the office chair, lets me set the height just right.
Same. Got a laptop and Blackberry at my first job out of college. Didn't take too long for me to realize that it actually sucked.
Later worked as a govt contractor and could leave my laptop at the office 90% of the time. Never realized how good that was until I switched back to a job with an on-call rotation.
I remember having some goofy message for my voicemail when I was in college. Some recruiter left me a voicemail scolding me for being so unprofessional... finally changed it several years later when I upgraded phones.
Custom ringtones on my old Nokia were always fun. I guess I'm old and lame now and just have the standard iPhone ringtone.
It's not really. Any decent bike shop has bins full of spare parts and take-offs. Then you always have eBay, Marketplace, etc. to find something strange.
Same thing here. I dumped Alexa stuff 4ish years ago for Google Home devices and its become somewhat of a let down. They really don't seem to have anything new while Amazon keeps releasing new displays/speakers.
My Nest Hub Max will only show the camera in the old Nest app while it never loads in the Google Home app.
I'm thinking I may have to try something else in the near future.
