BLS reports will typically get revised but this could be an indicator for full employment. Yes, the stock market is at all time highs - this is a common occurrence if you take a look at historical charts. However, the stock market != economy.
What most people in this thread are talking about is retail banking. Retail banking in the US lags far behind the EU in terms in technology and security. However, retail banking is only accounts for about 25% of total profits when compared to commercial and investment banking. This is where US banks have consistently beaten the competition. Especially since Brexit which has destabilized London as the financial hub of Europe
america's global presence in commerce is the backbone of american finance's global domination. nearly every country in world has a mcdonalds, starbucks, microsoft, ford and gm and the hundreds of thousands of enterprises ranging from family businesses to faceless behemoths and they all need FX and cash management and funding and commodity hedging and capital raising and securitization and nearly everything else.
which other country extends its commercial presence like this? the germans and the european banks (because german companies fund in euros) come to mind - coba, bnp, credit ag - but (1) german industry is not quite as big as the american industry (2) even the american supermarket-style banks like citi compete aggressively in this space.
This pretty bold statement what is this based on ? As someone who just moved from US to Ireland I def. not getting that impression. I also highly doubt there are banks in EU that can match say Chase on security side.
No idea how it is in Ireland, but in most of the EU, digital transfer between banks and countries is completely seamless. I can transfer money to family members accounts in different banks in the same country in a couple of minutes, and to another country in a day or two. I haven´t used a physical cheque since I moved back from the US.
The transfers thing yes (although it's cultural to an extent). The Clearing House's Real Time Payments network has launched in Jan. but people are not that used to products using it. On security side Chase's security spend dwarfs even largest security firms. If I remember correctly they spend on the order of 4 billion per year on security which among other things allows them to be running world class security team.
In a market where competent candidates start at 300K+ you can't hire a good team unless you a) have resource b)are actually willing to pay for talent. Chase actually has a very competent team. I have doubts there are many (any?) EU banks who's team is on par with Chase.
Yes, well, so the way it is in banking if you don´t have a competent security team, you won´t be in business for very long. And banks in general, everywhere and anywhere, have been in the business of security for a very long time indeed.
I´m sure American banks have very competent teams. So do the Europeans. Behind the scenes they all also tend to collaborate quite a lot in this area at least.
" if you don´t have a competent security team, you won´t be in business for very long" oh that what logic would have you believe and yet it very far from reality.
Traditional banks in Ireland are pretty bad by European standards.
I'm with Ulster Bank ROI (which is actually a subsidiary of Royal Bank of Scotland) and have had a fair share of minor issues with them. Their app also sucks big time.
They've had a major issue 6 months ago where a fair amount of folks were locked out of their accounts (or couldn't access the money, same same ultimately).
Friends at AIB have also had issues, like discrepancy between your online statement and the paper one, or getting their account straight up closed out of the blue.
I can't remember any specific with BOI but they also suck.
If you're in Ireland for long enough, do yourself a favour, get a Revolut / N26 account for your day to day, it's pretty smooth.
I should state that I'm only comparing the largest banks in terms of security. I have bank accounts both in the UK and the US. 2FA has only been recently (3-4 years?) introduced in the US and chip and pin has been in the EU for years now.
It's being more than that but regardless of how long it has being that way does not affect current state of things. Security is among other things a function of the SOC and the level of people running it.
I am curious what evidence do you have to even say the things about retail banking you mentioned here? Just out and out confirmation bias at play here. And the end result is that so many folks here at hacker news were mis-educated because of you.
This is exactly what the Breiman paper ("Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures") discusses. If you haven't read it already, I would say it's worth a read.
It might make a little more sense with the numbers. WinFall was a typical lottery game where you choose 6 of 46 numbers[1]. As with most lottery games, there is a jackpot payout but there are also payouts for matching 3, 4, and 5 of the numbers. The odds breakdown goes like this[2]:
Result | Odds
-------------
6 of 6 | 1 in 9,366,819
5 of 6 | 1 in 39028.41
4 of 6 | 1 in 800.58
3 of 6 | 1 in 47.40
2 of 6 | 1 in 6.83
The issue with WinFall is that when the jackpot increased past $5MM, the expected value of the non-jackpot winnings becomes favorable to the player. I.e. a 5-of-6 matching ticket might normally yield $4,000 but may yield >$20,000 for a "Roll-down" game. So if you go out and buy 200,000 tickets for the roll-down game (assuming all tickets are different and numbers are selected at random), you should expect to have 5 5-of-6 tickets, 250 4-of-6 tickets, 4,219 3-of-6 tickets, and 29,283 2-of-6 tickets. The combined winnings of all of those tickets makes it profitable.
If nobody wins the big jackpot ("guess all the numbers") for some time, parts of it are given to the smaller winners ("guess a few of the numbers"). In this case, which happened once in a while, it became more likely that you'll win more than you have bet. Usually this means you'll win some $50; they have bet many, many times, and won $50 times many.
Doesn't work any more, rules have changed so this way of winning was removed.
From the article, it seems that it doesn't matter, they're random. (Or were random, apparently it's over now, doesn't matter.)
To make up an example:
Let's say that betting $1 in some way has a 4% chance of winning, and the payout is 20x bet, so if you win on one ticket, you get $20. So, you buy a lot of tickets (say 1000), and you pay $1000. Most of them don't win anything, but 4% of them win $20; $1000 x 4% x 20 = $800; you have won some, but you have $200 less than you started with. Not a good deal.
However, if nobody wins the jackpot, it is distributed amongst smaller payouts, which changes the equation: still 4% chance, but payout is now $30. Again, you pay $1000, buy 1000 tickets, most don't win anything, but the 4% that do, you get $1000 x 4% x 30 = $1200. You have $200 more than you started with. Profit! Of course, this will only work if you buy many tickets; buying one or two, you're unlikely to win anything at all.
The actual numbers were different in these cases, but the general principle is the same.
> Of course, this will only work if you buy many tickets; buying one or two, you're unlikely to win anything at all.
That's the important part here. You can always win the lottery if you can buy enough tickets. To match all (n) numbers, you need to buy one ticket for every possible combination. To match (n-1), you need to buy a lot less.
But in a normal game, the cost of doing so is more than the payout. So if I have a dollar-game "guess a number between one and ten", and you can win $6 - it's not worth buying ten tickets, even if it guarantees you a win. But if I say "one day only, double the winnings!" - now $10 guarantees you $12 back.
The odds don't change, just the profitability of them.
In a normal lottery, if the pot gets large enough, even with the normal rules the "expected payout" of a ticket becomes higher than its list price. It's just that the chances of actually winning are so astronomically low that you'd have to be Jeff Bezos to stand a good chance of winning your bet (i.e. being able to buy enough tickets such that your chances of winning are worth the play, and then especially being able to absorb the loss when you lose anyway because it's still random).
What's interesting with the rolldown mechanism is not just that the "expected payout" of a ticket becomes worth more than its price, but that the number of winners is such that you can actually reasonably expect to turn a profit by buying a modest number of tickets.
Official lotteries are usually heavily regulated and audited to ensure they comply with their published rules. These are state lotteries we're talking here, not random gambling websites.
A. Any lotto requires faith. B. Selbee didnt put all his money in initially. C. The parent comment is just explaining a concept w a hypothetical example
The jackpot grows off of people losing money. Once people have lost enough money ($5M), the chances of winning the money with a single ticket are raised, however you can no longer win the whole $5M with a single ticket - the money is now distributed over a larger pool of tickets.
After that it becomes a good bet, because you can bet smaller amounts, but still win more than you put in initially - you're profiting off of people who lost money before you.
Someone can always win the whole 5M. It is just that if the prize for large enough and no one win, then the amount of the small prizes increased. It was a way to keep the total payout low.
Even weirder is the statement that the State that organized the lottery made more money thanks to them buying massive amount of tickets ( or maybe it was the publicity around the first newspaper article that triggered more interest, and so more participant in general ?)
I understand the opposite: the State didn't lose any money, (but didn't make any money from these people winning, either); it made money from lottery as usual, but not from these people. (There's an implication that more people in general bought tickets, didn't win, and so the organizer made money from those - but it's not entirely clear.)
The state makes money from every ticket purchased. The lottery simply pays out a fixed percentage of ticket revenue. More ticket sales means more money to the state, regardless of whether those tickets, when purchased, had an expected positive or negative return.
The ticket only has an expected positive value return under certain limited circumstances, not all the time (i.e. when jackpot has not been won for a time). State is not losing money in total - just moving around the distribution of prizes, but the sum total remains constant.
If anyone would be losing money here, it would be a hypothetical winner of the jackpot - but as the jackpot is only redistributed when there is no such winner for some time...
The prize pool losses the money, not the state. This was a mechanism to keep the overall prize pool from getting too large.
Of one person won the main prize, then they would get a car majority of the prize pool. Otherwise the prize pool was essentially distribute among all the players.
Yes technically if enough people played, they could have spent more than the prize pool, but, if enough people played, then the chance that one person won goes up as well.
No, because the payout for the state (the amount they planned on losing) was always the same. The amount was "lost" regardless, it just depended on if it went to one big winning ticket or hundreds/thousands of smaller winning tickets.
For this to be true, every additional winning ticket purchased must result in a net loss to the state. But it doesn't, every additional winning ticket purchased is money going to the state. The losers in this case are the other people with winning tickets, because their payouts become smaller¹.
¹Well, given one assumption about how the game is run. The other assumption is that the 3- and 4-number winning tickets have a fixed payout calibrated such that this doesn't fully exhaust the pot, and in this case the "loser" for each additional winning ticket is whoever wins the full pot next time as the pot will be lower than it would otherwise have been.
I think in this case the winnings were fixed and the surge in sales in Rolldown days would cause the pot to be drawn down much more, meaning a longer delay before the next Rolldown day.
So Rolldowns probably became less frequent, but otherwise the lottery made their money and everyone took home exactly the winnings they would have in that particular game.
I feel like mathematically, you must be right. One of the sides must be calculating their expected value wrong.
For example I can offer to pay a $3 jackpot (split across winners) for a $1 game for guessing heads or tails. If more than 3 people play the game, I make money. For each player, the naive way to calculate expected return is $3 * 0.5 + $0 * 0.5 - $1 = $0.5. So the players also think they are making money. But once you account for jackpot splitting, that "expected value" isn't positive anymore. To calculate this correctly, the player (who has less information) need some way to model the distribution of the number of other players.
> mathematically, you must be right. One of the sides must be calculating their expected value wrong.
He isn't right. The state doesn't work with expected values in any way. Money comes in via ticket sales, some of it goes into the state budget, the rest goes out as lottery payouts. There is no element of chance in any of that.
As you point out here and I point out elsewhere, the expected value of a ticket for the purchaser depends on the total number of tickets sold, which has been mostly elided from the discussion. In fact, it's mostly irrelevant as to this past event; at the actual ticket volumes, returns really were positive on the days in question.
The way the game is presented in the article is that the low payout numbers are fixed (so a 3 match on a given rolldown game pays out $50 regardless of how many winners there are). This is consistent with the state lotteries I know. In this scenario every ticket sold causes the state to lose money, on average.
It's a zero sum game. If one side is positive, the other side must be negative.
If jackpot isn't paid out, state gets (ticket_sales), players in total gets (-ticket_sales).
If jackpot is paid out, state gets (ticket_sales - jackpot), players gets (jackpot - ticket_sales). The winning players get ((jackpot - winning_ticket_sales) / num_winners) each, the rest gets (losing_ticket_sales).
Either way the expected value for an individual player is always the opposite sign of the expected value of the state.
The interpretation that people might be using is that: when the tickets sold is low, it's positive expected value for the players. When sales cross the jackpot, it's positive expected value for the state. But then it becomes negative value for the player! There's no point in time where both sides are winning.
(And of course that interpretation is pretty meaningless because you don't want to calculate the expected return based on the current number of tickets sold. You want the forecast of the eventual number of tickets sold. The state never really loses, even at the start because they have a pretty good idea of what this number will be in the end)
It’s a zero-sum game, but there are 3 parties: the state general fund, the prize pool, and the players. By regulation, a fixed percentage of each ticket sale goes to the state general fund and the rest goes to the prize pool. Also by regulation, all the money that goes into the prize pool must eventually be paid out to players.
The unpaid prize pool getting too big can cause problems for the operator: there may be accusations by the regulator that it’ll never be paid out, or it could be stolen or mismanaged leaving the operator insolvent because they no longer have the funds they are required to give to players.
A rolldown event is the operator choosing to increase the payout schedule to an expected win for the purpose of reducing their liability of unpaid prizes; tickets having a positive expected value is the entire point.
Actually, the state doesn't seem to enter into the equation at all, that's a red herring. State gets (ticket_sales - prize_money), sure. This amount is predetermined by the rules (usually "X% goes to state, 100-X% goes to prize pool). From here, the only changes happen in the way that the prize pool is distributed to winners: part goes to jackpot, part goes to smaller prizes; if jackpot too large, recalculate with a larger part going to smaller prizes. The amount that state is paid out is never influenced by this.
Example:
In round 1, state sells tickets for 100 ($, $thousand, $billion, doesn't matter). 50% goes to state, 20% goes to jackpot, 30% goes to smaller prizes. State gets 50, jackpot is 20, prizes of 30 are paid out.
Round 2: sell 100, get 50, jackpot 20+20 (from last round), prizes of 30 are paid out.
Round 3: sell 100, get 50, jackpot 40+20, prizes of 30 are paid out.
Round 4: sell 100, get 50, jackpot 60+20, prizes of 30 are paid out.
Round 5: sell 100, get 50, jackpot 80+20=100, recalculation triggers, new jackpot 0, prizes of 30+100 are paid out.
Round 6: sell 100, get 50, jackpot 0+20, prizes of 30 are paid out.
Note that in every round, the amount that state receives is independent of the relationship between jackpot and other prizes.
I have no idea what the exact numbers are. I have tried to illustrate how the temporary increase in the smaller payouts has no bearing on how much the state makes, yet it makes the game temporarily profitable. Obviously this still needs to be profitable for the players after taxes, expenses and whatnot, otherwise it would be a complete non-story: "person does not get richer playing lottery."
From what I understand, money paid out was calculated after removing state profit from sales. So the state always profited, whether prizes were paid or not. It was effectively a per-ticket tax.
What changed was the distribution of winnings among players and operator. If everyone had cottoned on the “winning strategy”, the prize would have simply been divided in smaller and smaller parts - at some point, the winning strategy would have become a losing one - and the operator wouldn’t get to keep any “unclaimed prize”, only whatever fixed per-ticket fee they might have applied.
That’s precisely what the rules aimed for, btw. They wanted to unload prize money at higher rates over a certain threshold, for their own reasons - and they did. It just so happened that a small number of players benefited disproportionately more than others, because they played smart.
Imho the operators chickened out - as long as their profit model allowed for all prize money to be really given away, they could have continued, maximizing their overall revenue. However, if “keeping some of the prize money” was part of the expected operator profit, then yeah, it couldn’t be allowed to go on.
The simple correction is that the pot doesn't live in your pocket. And the lottery don't offer a fixed jackpot, they offer the contents of the pot.
So a realistic correction of this, would be that for each $1 game, 50 cents goes in the pot, 50 cents goes in your pocket. If 3 people play and all 3 win, their payout is 50 cents. Obviously 50/50 odds lead to a disappointing game for the players - a bigger pot needs lower odds - but either way, the house never loses.
Overall? No, unless the game is very badly designed.
The whole situation arises from rolling over the losses between rounds, which "sweetens" the pot for intelligent players. It's also a good way to inflate your numbers if you know that your game might get cut next year (e.g. it might be better to show turnover of 100mm and payouts of 90mm than turnover of 10mm and payouts of 8mm).
> It's also a good way to inflate your numbers if you know that your game might get cut next year (e.g. it might be better to show turnover of 100mm and payouts of 90mm than turnover of 10mm and payouts of 8mm).
...wouldn't that be better under all possible circumstances? Would you rather have $10 million or $2 million?
You're not thinking about this the right way. The ticket doesn't have a positive expected return as a structural feature of the lottery. It has a positive expected return conditional on the total number of tickets sold being less than a fixed value.
That is correct: since these were not usual players who abstained from playing, but rather casual players who bought extra tickets just on rolldown, while the State got a cut from every ticket sale, they were effectively pouring extra money into the lottery, increasing the State's income.
Even if they re-invested their previous winnings, that would be twice (or more) that the State would get its cut from the same money, still increasing its income.
The money was "stolen" from the person that would have won the jackpot. The maximum jackpot was just smaller, it didn't make a difference to the lottery who actually won that money.
They could say that the jackpot will be split among everyone that has exactly one number right in the next round, and still make profit.
* Expected value of the lottery tickets is normally negative. (You pay $1, you expect on average to get back less than $1).
* At a certain point, if the jackpot grows too large, the game switches to a new "windfall" mode where the expected value is actually _positive_ to bleed off the jackpot. (You pay $1, you expect on average to get back more than $1).
* The couple and the MIT students only played during the positive expected value times.
Overall the game still makes money for the state, it's just it has two distinct regimes, and the people playing during negative-EV essentially bankroll both the state and the positive-EV players.
This is an extremely interesting perspective. I actually had the opposite experience. I was forced to learn sanskrit throughout my high school career and I absolutely hated it. I'm an extremely practical person and I have no use for the language at all.
There is no contradiction actually. While talking about the state of Sanskrit in school education, Chamu Krishna Shastry says[1] that schools are factories for producing students who hate Sanskrit.
IMO, whatever other reasons there may be, a most compelling reason for learning a language is its poetry (Robert Frost defined poetry as that which gets lost in translation), and here Sanskrit poetry is unlike anything in the world. You may like to read this collection of essays[2] that my friend wrote during his first real encounter with Sanskrit poetry.
Yes. (Mohan kindly included my name as "edited by", but all it means is that I read his essays and gave some feedback / made minor suggestions, before he posted it.)
The key phrase is "was forced to learn". I am not forced. I am doing it because I want to. I am also a very practical person. Sanskrit is a very useful language to me because it gives me great happiness.
A bit ironic that Yusaku Maezawa wants the mission to be about "World Peace" when the $200+ million he most likely spent could be better served on Earth. Just call it what it is, a wish to be part of something bigger.
Weather satellites, communications satellites, ground resource survey satellites, improved weather and climate models based on lessons learned by analysing the atmospheres of other planets. These have all boosted agricultural productivity on earth, putting more food into more mouths more cheaply.
In a matter of few days? Cause as far as I know human can survive without food for maximum of 10 days.
You argument make sense if we take human out of equation. Then we shouldn't be feeding poor AT ALL, given 1,000 years of founding tech with 100% budget would definitely save more lives.. eventually.
Edit: put it in other words: somebody is dying of hunger today so we can fund better technology for tomorrow, sure. Let's just hope its not me or you starving, if that kind of argument helps you sleep at night.
Nobody can grow a crop of rice from scratch in 10 days either. Agriculture intrinsically is a long term process requiring multi-year or multi-decade long investments. It's not a case of feeding people now OR investing in being able to feed them in the future. You have to balance both.
It's is entirely possible to fund agricultural development and space technology, and balance the two to complement each other. Space technology has a proven track record of massive technological and humanitarian benefits. Why are you complaining about it, instead of say people wasting hundreds of billions each year on Hollywood movies and TV shows, or many other unproductive activities which we spend more on than space.
Did you read the whole letter? It specifically answers how spending money on ambitious scientific and extploretory ventures leads to a lot of us inventing different stuff. The device you’re posting this comment was made with tech that was developed specifically for this exact space race :)
Obviously it's being spent on developing the rocket. My issue is that he specifically states that the mission is about "inspiring world peace". There are clearly better ways to inspire world peace than taking a lap around the moon.
For $200 million? I can’t think of any. Remember the world economy is approximately half a million times bigger than the amount of money being spent on this. Even the most recent summer Olympics (which are, I think, supposed to be world peace promoting) was 655 times more expensive.
There are numerous ways to address world peace such as through education, technology, medicine etc. According to this paper by the WHO and UNICEF there was a shortage of about $11 billion for immunization. How many hundreds of thousands could be saved from a $200 million donation?
Or it could be spent on mosquito nets. I’m told those are very cost-effective.
Or it could be spent on testing African-Americans for sickle-cell anaemia as children. I’ve been told that’s so cost-effective that it’s actually a negative cost per person once your account for necessary medical treatment as adults, as it’s much cheaper to provide effective treatment for those same people as children.
Or it could be spent replacing fossil fuels with solar power and electric cars so people don’t die from air pollution oh wait hang on…
Or we can make self driving cars so that distracted drivers don’t crash and kill so many people… hang on a minute, there’s a pattern here isn’t there?
So you don't think the headline, "Maezawa spends a quarter of a billion to save hundreds of thousands" would have a larger impact on world peace than the current one? Let me get this straight, I don't mind how he's spending his money. My entire issue is that he doesn't need to bring in world peace as a reasoning to go to the moon. He's helping advance technology which is a noble cause.
