Maybe paying more is something that should be explored...
I think for $500-$1,000 a month per person you would have widespread behavior change in most companies, and it wouldn't really even be that expensive in the context of total healthcare+wellness program spending.
My current company is paying 100%. The rates jump going from 1 to 2 people, and then again when you throw in kids. This has been my experience at most places, aside from the company fully covering the cost. The $820 number is entirely their contribution.
If we did have kids and needed them to be covered, we'd run out of what the company offers to cover up to ($10k / year) and have to start contributing as well.
I'm confused, wouldn't this be expected? More people, especially people who tend to make expensive additional people, would make the rate go up. Is your point that it went up more than double, instead of exactly double?
Yup this also mean that Tesla's radar and camera systems had 5 seconds to realize it was driving straight into an unmoving concrete barrier and did nothing...
What's really odd is, in my Subaru which has eyesight, if I drove straight towards that barrier the breaks would engage. Eyesight uses two visual cameras, about two feet apart, and uses the parallax between them to judge depth/distance (in the same way human eyesight judges depth).
So even if Tesla's autopilot steered the vehicle towards that divider, shouldn't the auto-braking system have engaged to avert the accident? Tesla vehicles also have visual image cameras as well as radar based ones, so the information density is even higher than Subaru's system.
I guess what I am getting at is: Is auto-braking disabled while autopilot is on? Wouldn't leaving auto-braking enabled (particularly using the visual cameras) offer a second layer of safety is autopilot made an error?
I raised the same issue when a Tesla with autopilot on drove straight into the side of a truck and the driver was decapitated. The discussion was all about "well radar couldn't distinguish it from road signs!" while ignoring that a Tesla has visual (optical) cameras front and center.
In the case of the truck, it was established that neither the driver nor the cameras would have identified the side of the trailer against the sky, and it's still ultimately the driver's responsibility to be alert and avoid such crashes. See the report here: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.PDF
From the report “NHTSA’s crash reconstruction indicates that the tractor trailer should have been visible to the Tesla driver for at least seven seconds prior to impact.”
Unless someone is operating trucks with adaptive optical camouflage, I think that the driver would be expected to note the presence of a big rig. Binocular cameras and radar may be expected to do the same, too.
(Note: Tesla models, to the best of my knowledge, do not have binocular cameras)
The auto-braking in Subarus with eyesight can engage in two circumstances that I'm aware of.
1: The car is travelling at 50 km/hr or less, and perceives an oncoming obstacle.
2: The car is using adaptive cruise control, and perceives that it is getting too close to the vehicle ahead.
I think there are some circumstances where the designers decided that auto-braking would actually be worse. For instance, at highway speed, it's usually not possible to come to a stop quickly enough to avoid a stationary object that has somehow suddenly come into your path. Say, a deer. It's best to take your feet off both pedals and swerve around the obstacle. This reduces speed while also allowing maneuvering, something that braking works against. It also gives drivers behind you more time to react.
If the Tesla system works similarly I would expect similar design decisions. However, I would expect autopilot on a Tesla to function similarly to adaptive cruise control, which will jam on the brakes when it thinks it's going to hit something. This has actually engaged erroneously on two occasions for me, on windy roads, so I only use adaptive cruise control in straight-arrow highway situations now.
I've noticed that in certain weather conditions the cameras will stop being able to get good enough data to make decisions. The car disables the system and notifies me with a warning indicator.
tl;dr - auto-breaking based on parallax cameras can't be deployed in every situation, and sometimes the cameras can't get a clear shot.
by 'blockchain-based' they mean, a normal election happened with traditional voting, and then some of the vote counters uploaded the tally of the votes they counted to a private blockchain
"The process, which aimed to prevent voter fraud in Sierra Leone, was powered by Agora, a blockchain voting solutions provider. The company used a permissioned blockchain to ensure that recorded data remained protected while also being transparent to the stakeholders, all of whom were given permitted access to the blockchain in order to tally the votes.
During the process, initial votes that are recorded on ballot papers are to be counted by neutral observers. The procedure, being watched by Agora, is the key step to entering that data on to the blockchain."
The amount of money saved with Robinhood is often lost in the less than desirable order routing that Robinhood internally provides. This is how they can provide "free trades."
Often they are executing lousier order prices than are available on other exchanges (the actual market.)
Other brokers, that make you pay for trades, send your order out to all exchanges.
Example: save $7 to end up paying 10 cents extra per share on 1000 shares. Looks like you actually got Robbedinhood for $93...
Other brokers take a fixed $7. Robinhood takes a percentage of your orders. Even for an order as small as $300, you can expect to get Robbedinhood for $7 or more (a couple percent.)
I think its a combination of things. One is that they were using etrade or another broker before robinhood came out. Two is that $7 on a typical trade is pretty small. Anecdotally, my trades are $1k-$5k, so $7 is maybe only a tenth of a percent, or the amount that I could lose or gain within a few minutes after the trade. Third, "if you aren't paying for it, you're the product." It is well established that your order flow is sold to larger institutions. I know it probably doesn't affect me in any meaningful way as a small fish, but I still don't like my investment decisions to be data for someone else's front running strategy.
Is that data that valuable though? Its not that unique, off the top of my head there are several companies that have similar datasets, Every movie theatre chain, every online movie booking service, every movie review site
- the theatre chains only have mostly generic datasets (the audience for movie X is mostly young white males) while MoviePass can do far more detailed analysis (and, in theory, could pass detailed questionnaires after you watched a movie, thus gathering more personalized data)
- online movie booking services (at least in my social bubble) are only used for movies where people think they don't have a chance to get a ticket without an early reservation
- movie review sites only have tiny bits of data about the readers, and the reviewer dataset is skewed - it only provides data about the people caring enough to do a review.
I agree with this mostly. However, the data coming from MoviePass may be flawed. I'm much more likely to see a movie I would never normally pay to see with a MoviePass subscription.
> I'm much more likely to see a movie I would never normally pay to see with a MoviePass subscription.
That is the exact thing that makes the data actually interesting: it removes the risk factor, aka "do I want to see a movie for $12/person and risk that it's trash?", from the viewer's decision process.
There's a lot more interesting data to mine there.
I'm a lot more willing to walk out of a movie I didn't pay for. There's not really a way to capture this data right now, but the MoviePass system requires you to have an app on your phone, and check in shortly before the movie, at the theater.
If I was them I'd be looking at putting audio fingerprinting on the phone to determine whether people leave before the movie ends.
Chains have data only for the times people visited their own chains (and might not have much info for counter sales), online booking services have a similar problem, movie review sites are much more limited in that not everyone writes a review for any movie they watch, leave alone all the movies they watch.
Here were mine
Here were a few of mine, I’ve tried to get into ethereum a couple times
- installing mist and getting it to sync is very difficult and time consuming
- connecting to a testnet and getting ether on the testnet is also very difficult
- most ‘cool’ dapp ideas rely on oracles to publish data about the real world into the block chain. When you dive into it you realize that such an Oracle would be very very expensive to run for even trivial usecases.
> most ‘cool’ dapp ideas rely on oracles to publish data about the real world into the block chain. When you dive into it you realize that such an Oracle would be very very expensive to run for even trivial usecases.
For example, if the problem domain is football games and gambling, well, scraping the results of those games from existing apis isn't too hard nor expensive.
If it's based on real-world stuff with no existing consistent API (e.g. you want a app based on housing), you'll either need to build that API, find a company to research and enter the data, etc.
There are implementations like Chainlink running decentralized oracles. At the end of the day, the data-source is still the bottleneck but they try to discourage bad actors through e.g. reputation mechanisms.
An Oracle is just a program that movies data onto the blockchain for dapps to use.
The data is an input to a transaction that eventually results in the EVM storing that data into a contracts (dapps) memory (which you pay per byte) that can then be exposed to other dapps.
So both instructions and memory uses something called gas. Right now 1 gas = 0.00000002 eth.
Now a MUL costs 5 gas and a ADD costs 3 for example. So you have to pay for contract complexity.
Now memory costs are not linear. The current gas cost equation for memory is Gmem * a * (a^2/512) where Gmem is a constant that is currently 3 and 'a' is the number of 255bit words (ints) you are storing.
This is for EVM internal memory that can later be accessed by the smart contract or other contracts. There is a way for contracts to output data that can be read out-of-band called logs but that is for getting data out of the EVM, not in.
I think the hate comes from some shady stuff the big brewers have historically done to push out smaller brewers, limiting tap and shelf space for craft, sponsoring laws that reduce ways that beer can be sold direct from the breweries or adding fees that hurt small players
There has to be more to this story. I would like to hear the bookmakers side of this. Perhaps the researchers were scripting or triggered some other kind of security tripwire.
Winning $900 split across several different bookmakers is absolutely nothing in the sports betting industry.
William Hill, one of the companies that the researchers claim restricted them is a multi billion dollar company. They aren't sweating small time bets like this.
EDIT: I noticed that the screenshots they used as proof their bets were restricted are for bets on very minor football leagues (Australian semi pro football), its common for betting limits to be lower for games that don't see a lot of betting action & is not proof enough to me that the bookmakers lowered their limits globally
Bookies will limit you no matter what your stakes are. You can get your account closed by placing £10 bets, and even if those bets don’t win!
Bookmakers are on the lookout for exactly the kind of betting behaviour described in the paper: people only betting on the top price, and shopping around for the best odds. If they see that you are only grabbing mis-priced offers, you are unlikely to be a profitable customer to them.
The bet size doesn’t really come into it. Just look at it from their point of view; why keep a customer who is costing you money, however little it is.
My guess is that it’s the manner by which they were winning. Thirty $50 bets per week over five months is over 500 bets. That’s not the long run but winning at an 8.5% ROI over that many bets is probably enough for the house to realize they’re somehow a winning player even if the stakes aren’t huge.
I'd suspect it was less to do with the edge, which isn't especially huge especially over the short run, and more to do with the authors' unusual selection of bets entirely overlapping the bookies' ad hoc analysis of bets they've mispriced. Particularly since the bookies watch each others' odds (as do scripts sold to wannabe arbitrageurs on the internet). Having a subset of winning betters with an information advantage may even help bookies overall if they know who those people are, but they'll want to limit how much they pay out for that information. Especially if the limits are market specific, and the section of the paper highlighting betting limits shows a screenshot of an attempt to place bets on Australian youth association football...
But $900 is pocket money bookmakers are willing to give away: around the time this study collected it's first data points I made more from fewer bookmakers just from intentionally +ve expectation welcome bonuses (and that was after they'd responded to the first wave of people pocketing welcome bonuses by eliminating them... for people from Denmark)
Sportsbooks in general don't mind winning players though, especially big ones. They make money off the vig and move odds to get equal money on each side of the bet so that they'll make money either way.
As someone who has worked in the sports betting industry, it depends a lot on the bookmaker. UK retail bookies hate anyone with any savvy, and will ban their accounts fast. Ditto "weird" betting that looks like it might be machine-run. Their business is taking old folks pensions from them.
OTOH, exchanges love all kinds of gamblers and won't ban you for winning any amount. "Smart money" Asian bookies will bet against anyone because their job is to have a better model than you. (Of course, there is a max bet on any offer, and the odds will move if you hit them hard enough.)
Also, everything in the abstract of this article is either old old news (strategy-wise) or plain wrong in light of the actual business of sports betting. "Implied odds" has been around forever, and real companies make real, consistent returns from arbitrage and "statistical arbitrage" on implied PDFs and have for years.
They hate “sharps”, winners who win through skill exploiting lines, they love those who win by chance. Sharps will continue to bleed them, the lucky fish often become whales whose luck fades over time.
You are confusing luck with expectation. Luck is the deviation from expectation. I've seen terrible poker players win a big tournament, or crush cash games for months on end, and quit their jobs because they mistakenly believe they are skilled at poker. Their positive deviation above their actual expectation (their "luck") soon evaporates, and they moan constantly because their results begin to actually match their expectation, or even worse, they get "unlucky" and their losses are greater even worse than their expectation.
The books rarely balance up though, especially for markets with more than two outcomes. Football/soccer has win/lose/draw (and you can never get enough money on the draw, as hardly any amateur is going be watching a match cheering on a draw!)
Horse racing is even worse for the bookies, with multiple runners, their books will rarely balance, and the standard outcome is a loss if the favourite wins. Any outsider winning a race is a ‘turn up for the books’. (n.b. this is for UK style horse racing betting, where the bookies offer fixed odds. Pari-mutuel or pool betting doesn’t have the same problem)
They're not a "winning player" in the usual sense. The casino wants players to bet on a certain outcome in some cases (in order to reduce risk, presumably) and therefore hands over the winning strategy on a silver platter.
I feel like the casinos just want those kinds of bets to be small. They don't want to over-correct in the other direction. By limiting these players that specifically make these kinds of bets, they reduce the risk of a big amount of money being bet in a short amount of time on the "winning" strategy.
It would be interesting to see where they are making their edge. I wouldn't be surprised if it's on a lot of these minor leagues with more uncertainty, as opposed to stuff like the EPL
I think for $500-$1,000 a month per person you would have widespread behavior change in most companies, and it wouldn't really even be that expensive in the context of total healthcare+wellness program spending.