You know what's more useful to know?

THE HOUSE ALWAYS HAS THE ADVANTAGE.

The Kelly Criterion only applies to games in which you have an advantage, even if you also have a risk of ruin.

Bayes' rule tells you how much to wager once you know your advantage, not just to keep from losing, but to maximize your statistical win rate. But if your advantage is 0 or negative, wagering anything is throwing money away.

That's why Vegas is the way it is. It can afford to be shiny and solicitious, because there are always people who think they can beat the odds.

I didn't see it as an engine at all.

It's just a particle being expanded by a laser beam then allowed to contract.

No indication of how it "does work on the optical laser field". Does the beam gain in intensity or frequency as the particle expands?

Now you're understanding why they couldn't keep count before.

Actually, you have it backwards.

The only way we could afford to do that then was politics.

We were willing to spend anything to perform a circus stunt to one-up the rooskies.

The cost of it was astronomical, and the psychological effect was that we believed we really could do anything we wanted. Then we tried to leverage it with 30 years of the shuttle program, but that just became another vast money sink that robbed us of the opportunity to do anything else, and the only thing we could think to do with it after a while was built a permanent nest of tin cans in orbit for it to visit.

Now you can't convince the public to spend a few bucks to get us to Mars, even though it's just the Moon shot with bigger air tanks, more fuel, and astronauts who are tough enough to live in a VW beetle for 8 months. Which is probably the proper political perspective, because what the fuck would we need to put boots on Mars for, other than to say we'd done it? And is that worth the lives we could save here with the money we don't spend by not doing it?

Want to solve the problem?

Do just one mission to go to the moon and bring back a few tons of the stuff, then scatter them around the planet.

Sell grains of moon dust for $1 each.

Stop pretending they're magical and reduce them to the dirt they are.

That's only true if you are one of those dopes who believes that price and profit can't be regulated.

The medical economy can work in one of two ways:

1) I have to lower prices as costs go down or my competitors will and I won't get any revenue at all and I'll go out of business.

2) I have to lower prices as costs go down or the government will slap me with a big fine and take away my license and I'll go out of business.

The reason (1) doesn't happen now is because the GOVERNMENT often gives medical-industry participants a patent or license that prevents competitors from getting into their field of speciality. Since it's the government that creates the scarcity and thus the opportunity for excess profit, then the government has every right to take its share of the value from that and either tax you down to a nominal yet lucrative profit, or fine you into lowering your prices to that level, i.e., system (2).

Right now, the people in the medical industry know full well that (2) can be implemented if the democracy only figures out that we have the power to impose it, so they spend a lot of money keeping the democracy from figuring that out. Not least by falsely demonizing government control of the economy (which they're only too glad to have in the case of the patents and licenses, etc.) and by generally tearing down government so it has little power to interfere.

And if a weak government and expensive healthcare mean more people are sick and the sick are more desperate, well, that's just synergistic with their goal of squeezing every last dollar out of anyone who prefers being broke to being dead.

I haven't seen a BSOD in a long while. But the past several times I thought my computer was beyond dead, a reboot, or a repair with the repair DVD, brought it back to life.

So, really, I'm hoping they luck into that, just to get rid of the wailing of the relatives of the deceased on the customer-service line.

They aren't lazy, they're productive, and taking advantage of the resources available.

When they're tired of putting the first-to-market markup and the bleeding-edge markup in their bank accounts, then they'll address reports of sluggishness or resource starvation in less-profitable market segments.

Right now, though, the fruit that are hanging low are fat and ripe and still fit in their basket.

N1 never had it and never will, neither. Neener.

You recognize that it's a company problem and that you're not enough manpower to get it done.

You get management to recognize that by explaining to them that it needs more manpower and it needs to be done.

If they balk, you're stuck dealing with it on your own, and it will be slow, and there may be times you just can't change something without changing several other things and you can't change them all in a short enough time to prevent the company from grinding to a halt, so you'll just have to leave them.

1. If all you want is "good results", then computer models are fine.

2. it's still expensive to build a model of anything natural, and still can't be perfectly accurate, because you can always make it an even more detailed copy. shorelines are fractal, and so are all the textures and texture mixes. at a certain point, you might as well just run experiments on the actual thing.

You can make a computer model fit a physical model.

Your physical model will never fit your computer model. At least, not if your physical model is supposed to be natural.

Then I'm guilty of not wanting people to be jealous of my naked body.

The cable company actually gave me 3 months free of all the movie channels, probably out of fear I was going to switch to the competition (around here it's directv vs dish network vs. cable vs. the believe-it-or-not the fucking phone company). And you're completely right. 50 new channels, and I find maybe 1 movie a week worth watching, and it's usually on at some ridiculous hour. I can't believe people pay upwards of $10 per month for just a portion of these bandwidth wasters.

No, when we have technology that reduces the problem of commercials and bad shows, then we will have solved the problem.

Of course, that technology has been around since the day the first home VCR was powered up.

It's called "time-shifting your favorite shows and fast-forwarding through the ads."

So the problem now is that people like to whine about a problem that was solved long ago. I can solve that by applying the principle of "closing my browser window and going to dinner."